Orange is the New Black in Enterprise IT

"In the entertainment and media technology arena, developing new ways of delivering multimedia experiences is an existential imperative"

This diversity gets even more complex as we look for ways to integrate our ecosystem of partners  each of which has an equally complex community of collaborators in their own organizations with whom Technicolor must work.

It would be impossible to effectively accommodate the different styles of communication and coordination if we were to implement a single solution, or adopt a rigid strategy for enterprise wide collaboration.

Collaboration-driven transformation

This is something that became very clear to us in the late 2000s’ as Technicolor embarked on a dramatic transformation strategy that would make the company a leader in the digital entertainment economy. The shift required our IT organization to undergo its own makeover. We had to evolve from being tactical ‘Order Takers’ to becoming much more strategic ‘Brokers of Services’ who anticipate needs and then match the best available capabilities to meet the key priorities and objectives of our organization.

Standardizing on a single set of unified communication and collaboration (UCC) tools may have provided a foundation for company wide connectivity, but it was not going to unleash the high-speed creativity that we needed in order for Technicolor to anticipate and then drive the expectations of demanding consumers around the world.

This realization, however, ran counter to conventional IT management philosophies.

Traditionally, IT shops have looked for ways to create common tools that eliminate redundancies and limit the variables for managing cost as well as risk. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with this thinking, unless we become too dogmatic in our implementation.

Without the proper perspective, we run the real risk of designing our technology investments around the process requirements of implementation, rather than keeping the needs of our end users and desired business outcomes at the forefront of our decisions.

At Technicolor we started our collaboration focused transformation initiative by identifying the critical categories of collaboration that needed to be supported, and then we worked our way backward to the types of solutions which could support those desires and requirements. The good news was that, often,each discrete end-user community had a fairly clear idea of how they wanted to collaborate to achieve their innovation objectives. We just had to listen and pay attention.

In some cases, traditional UCC solutions worked fine. In other cases, there were tools on the web that our end-users wanted to apply to their projects, or that they needed to utilize when they were interacting with key partners.

Over the past few years, the rise of new cloud-based applications has collided with BYOD practices to expose our employees (including  senior executives and our rank and file) to new solutions that they can rapidly implement.

Since we have a creative and innovative workforce, our employees tend to jump on many of these new opportunities. If my teams in the IT and security departments were to take a rigid line when these issues come up, we were acutely aware of two things we would simply be bypassed, and the demand would still be met by a growing  ’shadow IT’ underground technology culture that would expose us to unnecessary cost and risk.

What we have elected to do instead is to avoid being the IT Department of ‘No’. We have made it very clear that we are open to having our employees use new tools as long as they involve us in the process so that we can put the governance structure around it to protect our processes and more importantly our intellectual property. We have also taken a page from the commercial cloud industry, and worked to proactively make our user communities aware of new technologies and services that they may find  interesting as they collaborate.

What are we optimizing?

Developing this mindset required us to develop an IT culture that is willing to be flexible without compromising on our commitment to strong governance and risk management controls -allowing our partners to do their jobs effectively while ensuring that new technologies are deployed in a managed fashion.

From an IT management perspective, this flexible approach may not be the most efficient way to run a technology department. But we realize that we are not just managing to streamline IT performance. We are managing to optimize shareholder value. Or, as I like to put it, realize that Orange really is the new Black.