Where does digital signage and self-service kiosk systems belong in an organization?

Who is the best suited to handle digital signage and self-service kiosks within an organization? Should it be the marketing department, IT department or somebody else?

In most cases it seems as it is people involved in marketing activities who start up digital signage and self-service kiosk projects. Suddenly there is someone that sees the potential of modernizing the marketing and bringing it closer to the products and the customers. It’s often in the marketing departments where you find these visionaries when it comes to new marketing and sales methods. However digital signage and kiosks are often regarded as new and unknown tools. This may be compared to the days of website introduction. In those days using the web was something new and untested. There were lots of discussions about the profitability and value of entering such a medium. Despite the many doubts by many in the early days, the website is today a natural and necessary part of any marketing organization. The questions in those days were the same as you will hear today regarding digital signage; what are the benefits in relation to the costs, and who in our organization is going to maintain the media content used in the new system?

In many companies there is a sole person driving the new ideas. This person, often someone in the marketing department, then tries to start up a pilot project. This may cause some debate within the organization and the early adaptor may need quite a lot of help from the supplier of the digital signage system.

In some cases there is someone in the IT department that starts the discussion about digital signage. But in most cases the IT department is involved at late stage in the process. This may cause some resistance to the introduction of the new system. A better solution is that the marketing and IT departments start working together at an early stage. Unfortunately I have seen cases where IT departments have been forces to use systems that they cannot fully support.

Introducing a digital signage or kiosk system is very similar to handling the company or retail chain website. Also, there are many synergies between the two.  In a digital signage system there is a central server that may be compared to a web server and the server may be hosted internally or externally. Many questions are the same when it comes to content. Much images, video clips and text used for the website can be reused in the digital signage or kiosk system. In kiosk systems the kiosks can even be regarded as extensions of the web activities since web pages and database content may be reused. This means that it is useful to get the IT department and the people involved in web activities involved at an early stage to see the benefits of the new possibilities brought by digital signage and kiosks. By using open standards and relying on external industry standard creation tools, that are already used by content producers and web developers, the MultiQ digital signage system paves the way for a smooth entry into this new medium.

In most cases it is the marketing department that is most eager
to introduce digital signage and self-service kiosks.  

Lars-Ingemar Lundström
Documentation and Training Manager, MultiQ