We've been looking at new ways to gather data from our business processes and apply them to process improvement. Nancy Hill, project director for our department recently analyzed data gathered from several years of processing streaming videos. She identified a number of patterns that will be helpful in reducing the manual video processing workload for Jon Metty, our intrepid web developer and streaming video expert. One direction for improvement is to identify departments and people who generate the most video content and then develop workflows that simplify processing their content.
For example, a number of faculty members in the School of Health Professions record their classroom lectures for use by the students. We have been piloting use of a workflow that includes Camtasia Relay for capture and encoding followed by automated posting to iTunes U. This gets our team almost completely out of the processing loop, saving time for more creative tasks. Analysis of the video processing data allowed us to identify several faculty who produce a lot of content but who haven't yet implemented the automated process. Focusing on those high-volume producers should yield the greatest payback in reduced effort.
It's one thing to apply analytics to business processes. Stephen Wolfram takes it to the next level in this blog post.
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