Shifting Operations to a Service Delivery Management Mindset

Before purchasing a complex technical system, it is important to understand the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) rather than just the initial cost. Gartner defines TCO as a “comprehensive assessment of information technology (IT) or other costs across enterprise boundaries over time, including hardware and software acquisition, management and support, communications, end-user expenses, along with the opportunity cost of downtime, training, and other productivity losses.” The TCO of an operations center is usually dominated by operations costs (70-75%) vs capital acquisition cost. This imbalance is based on the fact that operation centers are traditionally designed as single-instance, stand-alone applications. These facilities are unable to leverage the efficiencies of standardized enterprise IT services. Additionally, they are often designed to be highly optimized to what the functional requirements are at the time of installation. While this may lower the initial costs it can result in significant investments down the road to meet changing requirements.

Change Operational Perspective

The IT industry addressed the high cost of operations and change management by implementing service delivery design and management practices. These practices measure system performance over time. They also incrementally update the service to meet goals defined by the organization. “Goals” can be performance metrics, cost, reliability, flexibility, or ease of use. They evolve over time as requirements and priorities change. This allows for maximum operational efficiency over the lifetime of the operation center. Applying these methodologies requires a change to traditional AV specification and design practices. Often, the operation center’s design only accounts for functional requirements (what the system does) with minimal focus on the non-functional requirements (how the system should do it). Service design principles concentrate on delivering a unified and efficient system, rather than meeting functional needs on a component-by-component basis. It requires more initial input from the stakeholders. However, it results in a system that delivers much more value over its lifetime than a traditionally designed and operated video wall system.

The Right Technology Can Help

Haivision’s CineNet™ Platform offers unparalleled flexibility to configure a visual collaboration system to meet evolving organizational requirements while also integrating into existing IT infrastructures. It is an ideal platform for service design and management of an operations center under existing IT service delivery frameworks. It runs on Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2019. That means CineNet can be added to the organization’s domain, be put under the Group Policy management, and leverage Active Directory services to control access and privileges. CineNet is built on a highly scalable and reconfigurable IP video distribution architecture. The platform has the ability for media transport on an isolated network. Read more about employing service delivery methodologies to optimize your operations center investment. Download the free Service Delivery Management for Evolving Control Rooms white paper. Contact Haivision directly to discuss our video wall solutions or schedule a demo of our CineNet software.