And there was another string. WGBH had to let Sun set up a customer demo center—a Sun iForce Center—in one of the broadcaster’s conference rooms. This is the first iForce Center ever established at a customer’s site; the 70 other iForce Centers are located either on Sun’s property or in a technology partner’s facility. While Sun covers the cost of the center and arranges most of the meetings that take place there, WGBH staff such as Rantanen and MacCarn have to take time out of their day to show potential customers how the technology works. Rantanen and MacCarn say on average two prospects tour the center each month, with most visits taking about four hours. They say the iForce Center gives WGBH the opportunity to commiserate with, learn from and share best practices with the other organizations. "We don’t look at it from [the perspective of doing marketing for Sun]," says Rantanen. "As long as we can further our enterprise DAM initiative internally and benefit from discussions with other customers, from the professional services, from the lab equipment we’re using for testing, and don’t have to put huge amounts of resource time into [the iForce meetings], it’s definitely in our best interest to participate."

Never would any of these trade-offs fly inside a for-profit company, according to Forrester’s Markham. After all, public companies rely on their intellectual property to compete, and they don’t like to get too chummy with their suppliers. "Businesses try to distance themselves from their vendors. When they’re renegotiating a contract, the further they are from a vendor, the easier it is negotiate lower prices and keep the competition open," says Markham.

Nevertheless, Markham notes a valuable lesson that for-profit companies can learn from WGBH’s effort. "If you have a strategic vision that’s important to your business, and if you can find companies that are on the leading edge of a technology and that can help you fulfill your business strategy, it pays to be an early adopter," he says. "There are pains involved in it, but in many cases, what you learn through that adoption, and the fact that you’re working with a company that is pouring a lot of resources into it and willing to negotiate very fair pricing for the technology, can really give you a leg up on your competition."

One benefit WGBH has seen from this effort that it didn’t anticipate was increased support from station management for the creation and implementation of the DAM system. MacCarn says the partnerships WGBH struck with technology companies and the fact that the reference architecture is gaining momentum have given the IT department’s credibility a substantial boost inside the station—and have helped with the change management effort necessary to make DAM implementations successful. Says MacCarn, "If other companies adopt what we’re doing, our IT projects are seen in a better light inside our organization."