The other day I walked into a large national retail store, which I am choosing not to identify, and there in all of its glory was the retailer’s implementation of a digital signage system.
Unfortunately, the digital sign wasn’t doing much other than occupying precious wall space. I shook my head knowingly, did my business at the store and left thinking back about the history of that retailer’s network of digital signs. You see, I know a few things about it because my company nearly won the contract to install hundreds of digital signs and digital signage network servers at this company’s retail locations around the country.
In a nutshell, what happened is this retailer’s IT department learned that their co-workers in the marketing department were about to sign an agreement for a large digital signage installation. That was all it took to derail the deal, and sadly the potential for digital signage to help the marketers at this retailer achieve their communications goals.
What would have taken a few months and a few dollars turned into agonizing delays, systems that didn’t perform as IT promised and most importantly years of lost opportunities to communicate with customers, which continue to this very day. Why? It’s all because of the IT department’s knee-jerk reaction to get territorial and take on the project rather than turning to proven expertise.
Please understand, I am not relaying this story as an exercise in sour grapes. Nor am I recounting it to tout my company’s digital signage products. I am telling this story to help you identify and avoid a major trap before it happens.
The lessons of this anecdote boil down to two easy-to-remember principles. First, just because there are monitors, networking and computers involved in digital signage doesn’t mean digital signage is an IT function. There are literally thousands of man hours of coding that go into the digital signage software needed to schedule, manage and play back video, audio, graphics, animation, text, to name a few media elements, in a way that is reliable, effective and serves the organization’s larger communications goal. Why should an IT department feel as if it must re-invent the wheel, and why should marketers with important messages to communicate have to wait?
Second, which is closely related to the first, know your core competency. If you are an expert at retail, spend your time and effort selling your product. If you are an expert and management, devote your time and effort to the making your organization more efficient and profitable. If you are an expert at IT, manage your organization’s information technology, including the hardware and software that makes its back office run. But for goodness sake, if you’re not an expert at digital signage, don’t think you can simply roll your own.
To do otherwise is to wander from your core mission, and even more importantly, to squander opportunities your organization otherwise would have to benefit from digital signage. Organizations can’t afford to the missed opportunities presented daily as they wait for their IT departments to reinvent the wheel.
