Investigating the Challenges of European Public Service Media Companies from an Enterprise Architecture Point of View

By introducing disruptive technologies, people started to consume media in new ways. Consequently, the media industry is concerned with adapting these new trends and develop new products, which fit the customer needs. In this paper, we investigate the challenges the public service media companies are facing in competing with the market and how those challenges can be addressed by Enterprise Architecture (EA). Based on a literature review on related work, we conduct a multiple case study with four European public service media companies from four different countries. In semi-structured interviews with eight people in three different roles, we could identify six challenges. Three of the six challenges could be confirmed by related literature. Many European public service media companies' chances for success are currently at risk by rigid organizational structures, resource scarcity, and silo mentality. Furthermore, in the mid or long term the historically grown, unstructured and hardware-focused IT architecture can cause problems with regard to agility in meeting new business requirements. Cross-medial production and reorientation on audience needs, are seen as further challenges in the long run. Finally, we discuss how and by which EA layers these challenges can be addressed.