Executive Summar y

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Digital signage is everywhere. Screens illuminate corporate boardrooms with the latest quarterly reports and marketing videos. They welcome visitors into the company lobby with public relations messaging and entertainment features just down the hallway. When you break for lunch, you’re likely talking to them in a quick-service restaurant’s drive-thru. No strangers to modern tech, our children now begin interacting with digital displays in grade school. When we travel, this same technology guides us through transportation hubs much more efficiently than static signs ever could.

And when you sit down at the end of the day and turn on the flat-screen TV in your living room, you’re connecting to programming using much of the same technology employed by today’s most advanced commercial digital signage.

It’s amazing how in just a few short years, the display technology available to us has grown more advanced than similar applications used in government and military facilities at the end of the last century. Think about that: An organization can purchase a screen or network of screens that are more robust today than what NASA and NORAD used just 30 years ago. More astounding is how quickly digital signage continues to evolve and how its price has declined to a level that makes it accessible to almost any type of private business and public institution.

DECISIONS! DECISIONS!

Despite the awe-inducing reactions digital signage garners, a lot of planning goes into selecting and implementing the right technology for an organization’s space. As an IT manager, researching these may seem like a job for your organization’s marketing department. Still, it falls into your domain. Why? Because IT’s impact on each step of the digital signage process is paramount and cannot be understated. Forbes magazine remarks IT departments are experiencing tremendous changes as their roles expand to impact customer service, sales, and even business strategies. As a result, organizations are increasingly turning IT into a driving force in all aspects of business.

So, along with selecting the most appropriate display technology for an organization, IT managers will be tasked with utilizing or modifying existing IT infrastructure, identifying sources to create whatever content the screen or screens will deliver, deploying the software and hardware methods to provide that content, and most importantly, securing the display(s) from curious employees and outside network attacks.

This white paper aims to give IT managers a bird’s eye view of the entire digital signage cycle and hopefully provide the basis for a successful deployment.