82017Media & EntertainmentDecemberCX O INSIGHTSBy Siva Saravanan, VP- IT, Aristocrat [ASX:ALL]1. How has your IT operating model changed during the last five years for the Media and Entertainment Industry?Gaming and entertainment in general are highly competitive markets where creating differentiators is increasingly a challenge, especially to keep people engaged. Gone are the days when people sat in front of slot machines, consoles, or their laptops and played simple games of chance requiring minimal skill: today they are looking to be entertained, to interact more with the content.In turn, this means creating gaming content that is far more complex and that leads to several requirements for a company like ours. First, you need to find top talent and we've done that with our creative studios around the world. Second, you need to find more efficient ways to handle the extremely large data sets that these games now require, across globally distributed development. There's a fine balance between keeping control over all those elements and making sure that new games or incremental releases get out to market as quickly as possible, against making sure that creative talent is given the freedom they need to be innovative and imaginative. For us, our Digital Asset Management (DAM) strategy is pivotal in achieving that, enabling us to make the latest version of a game in development available to everyone globally, far more quickly, while allowing teams to carry on with their existing workflows and tools. It's given everyone a `single source of truth' for all digital media assets and source code, across both technical and creative teams, with a global level of control, but customizable at local studio level.Less time is spent looking for the right version of a file, the risk of working on an outdated media asset is removed, and we can protect the brand and Intellectual Property (IP). It helps us to be more efficient in migrating product content between gaming segments and reduce digital asset time between sites, so we can work faster and re-use content better.2. What do you think are the biggest obstacles that technologists face in working in a more agile and outcomes based model?For an effective agile working model, architectural framework and standards needs to be in place for the practitioners to adopt for the delivery. But, with the rapid change in business landscape that technologists need to keep up to add value, having a long term architectural framework defeats the purpose. It's a double edged sword in my opinion. Change is the constant. With so many disruptors, roadmap set six to nine months ago needs to be relooked at as well. 3. Moving from traditional IT to a service offering model requires a major mindset shift in IT. How did you make that happen?Keeping the lights on by IT is long gone, business needs to and should take it for granted. How The Proactive Role of Technology in Building Effective Business StrategySiva Saravanan
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