Media Dojo

I’ve been submerged the past few weeks for both personal and professional reasons. On the personal side, we’re selling my 89 year old mother’s house, which has 45 years worth of stuff crammed into it. For those of you who’ve walked in those shoes, you feel the pain.

Professionally, I’ve started a consulting project with the senior operations people at one of the top five global media companies. You love their music, movies and plug in their consumer electronics—get the drift? I can’t give a lot of specific detail for NDA reasons. But it’s no great secret that the physical supply chains for media (eg. from a master file to a CD/DVD sitting on the shelf at Wal-Mart) are undergoing profound change.  I don’t think there’s a clean flip from all physical to all digital production and distribution of media. People still like to own *stuff* at the end of the day.

That said, the transition to a new media supply model has cloud computing written all over it. Go ahead and Google “Digital Supply Chain” to see why. The number of linkages between finished and semi-finished media goods, co-mingled professional and user-generated content, commerce and community functions suggests that the cloud just might be the only institution capable of taming that kind of complexity. There’s definitely no lack of challenge here.

I’ll document some lessons learned in a couple of months.

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