Enterprise Video: More Important than Ever
What percentage of your workforce is due to retire in the next 3-4 years? In recent meetings with several of the largest companies in the midwest, I have heard anywhere from 13-24%.
How will your organization transfer the wealth of irreplaceable knowledge and experience to today’s student who will be entering your workforce in 2-3 years? If you do not have a strategy for meeting the needs of the future managers and leaders of your company, you are positioning them for failure. Even worse, you're potentially putting the long-term shareholder value of your company at extreme risk.
You can mitigate that risk by going all-in on enterprise video, if you haven't already, and you should take your cues from one of the biggest trends in higher education: the "flipped classroom," where students receive the content of their lessons via video before they engage with their teacher/professor in an immersive learning experience that stimulates greater levels of learning in less time. In this model, teachers become coaches, observers, and guides as their students progress through the learning levels. The “flipped classroom” experience is producing generations of workers who are more collaborative and interactive than at any time before in the history of business.
Imagine what happens when those students enter the workforce and are promoted to leadership positions. They will expect experiences and opportunities to learn and grow in the workplace similar to what they had at their educational institutions. The next generation of worker is mobile, connected, and can be expected to take for granted the ubiquitous access to information whenever, wherever, and however they choose. They subscribe to Netflix because they don’t want commercials. They watch from their phone, tablet, or PC for long periods of time. And they go to YouTube to figure out how to fix a troublesome appliance, install a new faucet, or change a tire on their beach cruiser bike.
So how is the enterprise attracting, retaining, engaging, and informing this emerging wave of information hungry workers? By using video. The challenge is that these organizations have spent hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to upgrade their networks and possibly migrate enterprise applications and services to the cloud, yet they are not prepared to deliver live or on-demand video across those same networks. Sure, many have built out robust infrastructures to accommodate the needs of point-to-point or even multi-point high-definition videoconferencing (or telepresence). What many fail to realize is that streaming live events or delivering massive libraries of on-demand video or user-generated video content to the desktop, tablet, or smartphone of the mobile and impatient worker of tomorrow presents a unique set of challenges. Let’s face it, enterprise networks are not like the big cable conglomerates. So few are capable of sending out one stream for all to see (multicast), which means you have to send one stream out to each viewer (unicast). This quickly becomes economically unfeasible to those dozens or hundreds of locations where you might have hundreds to thousands of viewers with a relevant need to consume on-demand video for training, compliance, safety, self-improvement, or the latest thought-provoking message from leadership.
There is no cookie cutter answer. Every network, workforce, and workplace is different. And delivering a buffer and jitter-free viewing experience has multiple factors that must be considered. When video fails, the typical response is “why can’t we do it here at ABC Company when Netflix or YouTube can?” Subscribers vs. employees is one answer. Netflix gets $7.99 per subscriber per month. And for that it can take every show or movie and transform it, copy it, to over 100 different formats and data rates so it they can deliver that video anywhere on any device with a very high degree of success. The good new is that s it will not likely cost you $7 or even $5 per month per employee—but it may be $2 to $3 per month for a secure, manageable, measureable way to engage them.
If you agree that video is a more effective way to capture and communicate the insight, passion, and experience of your subject matter experts who are due to retire next summer, then it is time secure some stakeholder buy-in and get a video project started. Otherwise, it may be time go to your CIO or CEO and tell them now that your company may be at risk of not being prepared to support the needs of the worker who will join the organization in the next 2-3 years.
Even if your organization implemented a “video solution” three or four years ago, it is time to evaluate the adoption, consider the interaction with new enterprise applications (i.e., portals & social media), and measure the ability to connect to a more mobile workforce than what you were supporting before the iPad or iPhone 4.
[This is a vendor-written article. Streaming Media accepts articles written by vendors based solely on their value to our readers./
Related Articles
Are video platforms geared toward the enterprise more than just repackaged entertainment platforms? Here's how to make a choice.
12 Jan 2015