Full-Motion Panic

My industry reading is backlogged, so I didn’t see this item until recently. A press release from the Gartner Group outlines an article that predicts that by 2013, more than 25 percent of content that workers see in a day will be pictures, video, audio. The author claims, “enterprises that see such growth as irrelevant to their operations risk alienating themselves from customers who start to request video communication services.” Hold the videophone, this could be a sea change, perhaps a revolution. The article seems to predict workplace chaos. “Users … will not accept onerous restrictions of inflexible security, access controls or forced metadata schemes in the workplace.”

The Gartner Group is usually an excellent source of statistics, industry trends, and other hard-to-find research, but I’m not getting the urgency or danger here. Certainly, the use of video online has skyrocketed, partially because of the prevalence of broader bandwidth, better compression algorithms, and faster hardware. Mostly, though, video is more popular on the web because there’s something to watch. As we used to say before the .com collapse, “Content is king.” Employees are going to YouTube and Hulu to relax and enjoy themselves; they’re not checking out the CEO’s video blog in droves. Entertainment is different from office life, at least for most people. A tedious office video is equally boring in the conference room or on a desktop.

Video can be a great medium to demonstrate physical procedures, impart wisdom from an expert, or give a live view of an event or place. In the 60 or so years that video has been widely available, it has both entertained and enlightened us. Putting it on a computer isn’t something that organizations have to prepare for any differently than they had to prepare for voicemail, email, faxes, and the like. The most important question is not “What will customers demand,” or “What will our employees put up with,” but “What business need does video fill?” From that starting point, we can examine what to do about it and look back at the recently trod paths of websites and collaboration tools for some guidelines.

In order to put this technology in the hands of employees, we need to do a little scratchpad work on procedure. It’s a good idea to figure out what video is for in an organization before letting everyone loose with a camera and upload space. Every other method of business communication is governed by policy; untested ones like video should have some broad guidelines. I don’t mean to suggest locking the general counsel in a room until there’s a 400-page ironclad policy, but the same rules for trade secrets, appropriate language, etc. need to be in place for video. Next, let people try it. Employees can cover meetings, construction progress, depositions, or whatever they think makes sense. Let them record with cell phones, Nanos, videocameras, or anything else on hand. Give them space to upload within the intranet and take stock. Now that people have gotten their feet wet with video, the organization should have some ideas on further policies and directions.

Once the organization knows where they’re going with video, it’s time to look for technology. Any sophisticated video-handling system licensed within the next twelve months will probably be replaced by something five times as good and a third as expensive by 2013. Organizations must determine how immediate the need for video communication is. If they can wait, they should do so. There are plenty of content management technologies out there that handle video to a degree, but we’re a long way from a SharePoint-style video intranet server, at least for most groups.

What’s most important is not to panic. Audio, video, and pictures have been around a long time, just not on the intranet. I know it seems like a lot: we’re just getting used to “wikis and blogs,” now there’s video. Start small and see how it feels before taking the plunge. Otherwise, your adventure will be all licensing and servers, but no video.