Media Tech!

The Indian electronic and print media are gradually making the transition to tech-have-nots to the tech-haves. From Hindustan Times which gets its design re-done by leading designers from abroad, using the latest technologies to companies such as Adlabs which are implementing an ERP solution for accounting and other activities, we find that the 'Tech' buzz word has been enmeshed into the thought-fabric.

Financial Accounting, Sales Force Management, Campaign Management etc. were previously thought to be human capital intensive jobs. Exit the old rational school, enter the seemingly irrational new school - where each and every activity can be traced via a project management Work Breakdown Structure chart and collated to an item in the company's Chart of Accounts.

Companies such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft etc. have come up with solutions that address issues in CRM, HR, Knowledge Management etc. that can be tweaked for the Media industry. Especially industry specific solutions from the SAP and Oracle stables take away a great deal of the pain that normal CFOs,CTOs and CEOs in the media space undergo on a daily basis while transacting their business.

Of course, this comfort comes at a price. While ERP as a buzz-word has become popular due to plain vanilla implementations, the true value is often found only at the end of the rainbow when the client either implements a lot of the value-added features, which he must of course pay a premium for, or indulge in a great deal of customization. The latter is because of the peculiar nature of our indusry, which is still ad-hoc and not process driven. Best practices from abroad cannot be implemented in a home-grown company as easily as it can be in an MNC subsidiary in India. As a result, ERP implementations normally take recourse to customization to mimic to-be processes that have some delta from the existing process.