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March 12, 2009
Coalition-building
8/13/2007:
"Lynn, I want to feel around campus to see if any parallel departments are interested in collaborating on the digital signage stuff. It could bring costs way down and make management easier in the future if we expanded this across campus, even just to a couple departments."
Our first step was to get the impressions of the "IT Commons Shared Capabilities Group," a regularly-convened group of campus IT leaders who seed this kind of collaborative action. Between this meeting and a few others, as well as some informal chats with our peers, we found that a lot of groups were at least thinking about these products; many were doing research and a few already had something deployed.
It wouldn't be practical to do this across the entire campus at once, clearly. We decided we'd try to create an agile team of facilities that would work together on a pilot, selecting and deploying a signage solution that could later scale to the rest of the University. If nobody else had to go through requests for information, contract negotiations, server installation, etc., we'd be saving tons of work and lots of money.
Lynn Johnson suggested a way to get the word out, to coalesce the pilot group, and to get an idea of what the best product might look like in the meantime: we'd hold a "trade show"-style event and invite everyone on campus that might even be peripherally interested in working on this.
In early 2008, we asked ten suppliers to visit our campus, and brought together over a hundred IT pros and facilities managers.
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Comments and conversation are encouraged!
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Interested in participating? Need digital signs in your facility? Have specific questions? Post a comment here or contact the author.
Posted by dchase at March 12, 2009 08:38 PM