Connections

Making content smart requires technology, processes, data and, of course, people.

What’s equally important — and the driving force to making content smarter — is innovative leadership. Organizations are constantly evolving and the future of “work” revolves around smarts, especially data smarts. Every organization relies heavily upon data, and smart data creates smart content.

So how do you navigate the “now” of your organization and the massive amounts of data it produces? How do you produce smart content within a rapidly changing world?Ruminating about the notion of operational excellence, leadership and future forecasting in relation to the world of rapid change we are living in, I’ve noticed how little progress has been made in the field of strategic forecasting for innovation in con-tent companies.

In the coming years, businesses and their leaders will rise or fall based on their ability to pivot on a dime, anticipate and creatively respond to rapid change. But how exactly does one anticipate and creatively respond to change in an era when so much seems unpredictable? Predicting the future will always remain problematic, even with the availability of predictive algorithms spanning areas such as M&E, data, technology, finance and global supply chains.

Guidelines in this realm are over-due for improvement.Too many organizations wait far too long to make originative changes.

They wait for yearly budgets. They wait for some fancy technology to solve all their troubles.

They wait for seasoned staff members to re-tire so that they can swivel around change management issues. Meanwhile, everything deteriorates … especially the smart content. And you don’t have to let your content suffer.

The formula for keeping content smart is rather simple: Get started now, on any changes you see that need to be made. Innovative leadership is the art of doing things you’re not sure about, making the best decision possible based on available knowledge, awareness and data.

Generating a spark for making things better. Leadership is often conflated with management, yet they require completely different expenditures of time and energy.

An innovative leader needs powerful imagination, and the ability to focus on the big picture, work with creative thinkers who can add to the established vision and make it greater. While effective managers require knowledge of the work to be done, along with awareness of best practices, being an innovative leader requires a bold instinct for changing things to create a superior organization, one that creates superior offerings (such as content).

Innovative leaders are bold enough to demand changes and improvement to their technology, and pivot against comfortable, yet antiquated, workflow processes.Innovative leadership is voluntary, being willing to take risks, with the goal of making your product (con-tent) better.

And so much of what informs that is data: An organization needs smart tools, technology and people to surround that data, and organi-zation-wide access to that data and insights must be provided to facilitate decision making. With intelligent data available to your “human supply chain,” more-informed perspectives result in groundbreaking in-sights on most any given business challenge … including creating smart content.

Freeing your data to your people results in business-wide opportunities.

Overly cautious leadership and bland data results in plain content solutions. There’s a dire need across Hollywood players to reinvent their processes to change that, and make content smarter. The opportunity is huge, and the tools already exist to make your content smarter than it is today.

Be innovative, and make your future now.

* By Mary Yurkovic, Director, Smart Content Council, MESA

——————————————————

Click here to translate this article
Click here to download the complete .PDF version of this article
Click here to download the entire Spring/Summer 2020 M&E Journal