Automating operations
Mar 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Tony Lockard
Avoid the workflow to nowhere by creating a new framework for digital content.
The 10 phases of workflow
Experience has shown that the process can be simplified by mapping existing and future work effort and processes to a series of phases, along with the triggering events and dependencies that move the workflow between phases. (See Figure 1) Many processes will only use a subset of the following 10 phases:
• Planning — the upfront knowledge about the work to be performed and the data entry within the various systems to prepare the workflows for activation. Resources, assets and time frames are first determined in this phase. The planning phase is typically driven by business artifacts such as program schedules, purchase orders or work orders.
• Receiving — the arrival of assets, metadata and business data into the organization from third parties or external departments within an organization. These arrivals are typically the triggers that start the workflow processes.
• Ingesting — the effort to enter the assets and data from the receiving phase into the organization’s internal systems. This can be tasks such as creating work orders, checking physical and digital assets into the content management system, transforming external metadata into internal standards, and unpackaging content from container formats. In addition, this phase can represent the transformation of the raw received assets into the proper working formats for the organization’s workflows via such tasks as dubs, conversions, or file encodes.
• Analyzing — the tasks regarding completing the gathering and input of additional data required for the workflow and verifying that the source assets are defect-free and meet the specifications required by the workflow. This includes tasks such as human or automated quality control checks, logging of assets and adding business or metadata to control systems.
• Preparing — the source content preparation work required as part of the workflow and any associated business processes. Typical tasks include editing, trimming and black removal. • Finishing — the tasks related to the final creation of the target assets and any associated business processes. These include element conformance, standards conversion, dubbing and transcoding.
• Packaging — tasks related to assembling and packaging of content into any required container formats for delivery. Typical tasks include creation of MXF files, tar/zip archives, digital cinema packages, CableLabs’ VOD wrappers, etc.
• Testing — tasks related to validation of assets, packages and other deliverables created by the workflow and the business processes related to such quality control activities.
• Delivering — the physical or electronic delivery of the finished products of the workflow. Typical delivery tasks include broadcast transmission, file transfer, streaming and physical shipment.
• Disposing — the final disposition of assets and other deliverables from the workflow and closeout of open business processes related to the workflow. These include vaulting or archiving of assets, returning assets to content owners and destroying assets.
Avoiding workflow islands
Once the automated work processes, resources, sources, triggers and deliverables are codified, it’s time to select a technology to implement the workflows. Many organizations have existing automation and workflow tools provided as part of their operations management, broadcast, encoding or editorial systems that can be leveraged to provide some or all of the required workflow functionality. While many of these vendors have made great strides in opening up their architectures, they still tend to focus on managing the automation of their specific segment of the end-to-end work stream. This leads to islands of automation within the enterprise workflow, with manual human tasks required to bridge the gap between environments.
In order to create an end-to-end workflow system, organizations must look beyond point solutions and strive to build a technology platform capable of managing the numerous heterogeneous systems present in the modern media environment. An enterprise workflow management system will naturally contain many complex features and interrelated components; however, there are five key attributes vital to an enterprise automation and workflow system.
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