-- Empowering Creativity Through Self-Serve and Business Continuity--
Self-Serve Adjective
Definition of self-serve: permitting self-service
--
Business Continuity
Definition of business continuity : The process of creating systems of prevention and recovery to deal with potential threats to a company
How do you self-serve access your content if simply working away from the office or if access to a building or even to a whole city is blocked? Many of the requests we receive for enhancing our technology roadmap come from customers wanting fully automated and tightly integrated workflows so that their creative teams can self-serve content from their archive.
Surprisingly (or not) this level of self-serve capability and business continuity is not possible at many creative organisations who require people and physical access (or manually serviced requests) to access their content.
From over 15 years of listening to the creative community we have deduced that this commonly comes down to one or more of the following three reasons: the archive content is sat on legacy archive technology (LTO); the content is sat in geographically dispersed locations or on multiple silos of storage; or, that the content requires human services to perform the access requests. Often those people servicing the requests have many skills to offer but they get bogged down in daily mundane media management tasks that can and should be automated. Automation and workflow integration that would enable creative teams to self-serve, to simply get the content they want instantly and thus empower creativity.
I just wish the producers could get the content themselves! I spend all day looking for stuff they have no access to and I have other things to do! La Media Manager, Paris.
Throughout many aspects of our lives, we subconsciously self-serve without even realising it. However, even outside of outages or natural disasters, many professional creative staff still need to ask for data from the archive; and, they still have to wait for content to be retrieved and delivered which is crazy in this day and age.
With this in mind we decided to take a look at 5 things we take for granted today in terms of self-serving that people used to do for us:
--
Filling Up
In 1961, self-service petrol pumps were introduced to the UK. 59 years later, there are now very few petrol and/or gas filling stations that remain where someone (the gas jockey) fills up your vehicle for you. Even without the snails pace electric car revolution, we are all used to getting out of our cars in good and inclement weather to serve ourselves, often paying at the pump, before driving off at our leisure.
You can even pay in a car with a phone app these days and just drive away !
Pros Quick, efficient and convenient. No teenager attendant taking a chunk of paint out of your motor
Cons Loss of human interaction can be cold/wet, delays caused by the technically incompetent. No one offering to clean your windscreen
--
2. Show me the money!!
Ah queuing at the bank, filling in the little paper slips or having your book stamped, just to withdraw cash from your bank account. You get to the front of the queue and then the shutters come down as its break time for the tellers. Absolutely painful. Especially, if your funds were low, you need more than you have and the bloke behind you is sniggering at your discomfort. Ah, memories
How times have changed! Now you find an ATM and you use it. Done.
However, even that is changing as we move rapidly into the cashless era. Tappy tappy (the act of tapping one's card, watch or phone against a terminal) is on the rise and it is super convenient. Some could argue it actually makes us feel a bit better about spending the money. A true revolution*!
Pros
You can now control all of your finances at your fingertips enabling you to make more informed decisions
Super convenient cashless payments make purchases frighteningly easy
Cons Its the death of wishing wells, let alone making life even tougher for beggars, buskers and charity volunteers. We rarely have cash in our pockets and we are not about to throw our plastic into a wishing well or fountain. Not just because thats stupid, but also there is enough plastic in our water systems already!!
Community branches are closing which means those without technology in their hands lose out. Advances in technology and commerce often leave the more vulnerable behind. You need to travel to the big town or city to speak face to face with the bank.
--
3. Directions (Google Waze, etc )
Remember when you had a paper map stuffed under the seat in the car?
A map with pages missing, crumpled or with footprints on them from the kids dirty shoes?
Or when you had to stop your car, roll down your window and ask a stranger for directions?
No?
Well, you are probably under 30 for starters. These days google maps, Waze or Tomtom takes us where we need to go. We self serve by popping in the address and off we go.
Pros Often saves time and money, no more map reading arguments with loved ones. No longer being directed in completely the wrong direction by a mischievous local. Realtime route updates based on traffic
Cons Nothing to think about unless you live on one of those small lanes that HGVs and trucks get stuck in!
--
4. Caller Putting you Through!
Until 1975 in the UK, if you wanted to call someone you either had to be manually connected (in the early days) or later on the operator would put you through or would sometimes provide a number. This could take some time, was sometimes erroneous and when directory services were privatised, it would cost you an arm and a leg.
The advent of the interweb, Google Maps and mobile telephony means we self-serve on a massive scale. Theres no person connecting you, no calling the operator or directory services
