Who should be given control in the digital signage network?

It really depends on what the purpose of the network is and what you are trying to do with it. You would also break it down into different functions. There are people on the operations side who are going to be concerned about the physical hardware, the screens , are they up and are they working. The maintenance issues, if its projectors do they have bulb issues that they have to replace. That’s typically an operations person.

The content design and layout is typically a graphics person. Who’s going to be the guy who’s going to be interested in making messages more impactful and pretty and within guidelines of brands. You’ve also got people who would be responsible for the data side and all the information. You’re going to find some POS System; it’s going to be the IT people who are going to do that. There are a lot of networks out there that try and allow you to go in and hit networks or hit databases and they allow individual players out in the field to do that. It’s an absolute security nightmare to do that. That really should come back to a central point within the IT department and the IT department should have that within their firewalls and be well-fielded so that it goes in when required and gets the data and deals with the distribution. Allowing outside external nodes in is not going to happen in any decent-sized network – they’d never allow it.

So it really is a division of labor. You have to determine what the appropriate thing that has to happen and then who are the appropriate departments and people that have to be responsible for that. It could be one person in some companies or it may be split out to others. You’ve also got, in the way of content, a lot of different content contributors. In a university you would have the student body would have some input, the faculties would have input, maybe the registrar wants to have some input to let people know that it’s time to sign up for courses. So you have many, many contributors and you need to look at how do you permission those people appropriately and give them the ability in a very easy intuitive interface to do what they need to do without making them learn how to deal with the data acquisition side because they are never going to do it anyway.