European, Mediterranean & Middle Eastern Conference on Information Systems 2013(EMCIS2013) October 17-18 2013, Windsor, United Kingdom David Fuschi And Atta Badii 1 Media Production Process Management Support: the Challenges Faced by Decision Makers MEDIA PRODUCTION PROCESS MANAGEMENT SUPPORT: THE CHALLENGES FACED BY DECISION MAKERS David Fuschi, Brunel Business School, Brunel University, UK david.fuschi@brunel.ac.uk Atta Badii, Intelligent Systems Research, School of Systems Engineering, Reading University, UK atta.badii@reading.ac.uk Abstract The paper outlines the research performed to address the challenges faced by decision makers in the context of media production. The aim is to point out the issues encountered by decision makers in the content production industry, how they are changing and their impact also on grass-root content making. The work reported has focused on the modelling of the process implied knowledge for facilitating the monitoring and management of the processes. The overall objective is to ensure quality result in line with ISO9000 prescriptions in a creative context with huge external constraints. Keywords: Knowledge management, Workflow, Process Management, Topic Maps. 1 INTRODUCTION AND CONTEXT In most contexts, for decision makers, the need for information organization, classification, clustering and summarization is a direct consequence of the experienced lack of time that should, in no case, hamper the quality of decision making. Knowledge management is crucial in this yet a major problem is the capturing and management of implicit knowledge on the one hand and the external pressures that tend to push for a constantly shorter time to market often achieved at the expenses of the process documentation and knowledge gathering. In some cases, even when additional information is available this does not benefit the decision process as time constraints, as well as other pressure factors (Rondeel et al 2008), may limit the overall decisional ability, even though not always (Ahituv, Igbaria and Sella 1998). What usually happens is that, depending on the kind of criticality of the decision to be taken and the expected impacts, the decision maker tries to make the best possible use of the information available at hand based on own experience and perceived level of risk so as to achieve what is felt/believed to be the best possible outcome (Rondeel et al 2008). In domains where creativity plays a dominant role, like the media industry, the decisional process is often scarcely supported by rich factual information (unlikely in the business domain) not because they are considered marginal, but often simply because they are unavailable. At the same time if the managed process was a simple one things could be easier, but unfortunately, the media production process has always been rather complex and has often required the adoption of reference models and standards to ensure the desired level of quality (for example see ‘The Chicago Manual of Style’ or the ‘Xerox Publishing Standards: A Manual of Style and Design’, or the ‘Web Style Guide, 3rd Edition’ in the publishing domain). The constant evolution/rise of (new-)media further increases such complexity; in the film and TV industry a rather consistent number of standards have been developed and applied in time to the production, projection/broadcasting, storage and distribution of content, but the advent of Internet has brought new formats and scenarios (from IPTV to iDTV, etc.) well beyond the simple availability of cable and satellite distribution along with new issues and problems that have to be managed. In such a scenario workflow scope is often limited to the automation of tedious or error- prone processes like the content annotation (Dorai 2001) or the adaptation for delivery to a different device than the originally expected ones (Badii et al. 2005, 2006, 2008).