As an HR or communications leader, you understand deeply the role technology plays in keeping your workforce connected – and how building connections can help companies withstand, and possibly even thrive, in tough economic times.

As much of the world looks to be heading into a recession, and everyone and their dog is “doing more with less”; HR tech solutions that improve engagement, productivity and retention, and integrate with your existing tech stack while maximizing its value, make good business sense.

Digital signage, when leveraged for internal communication and improving employee experience, ticks these boxes (and more). Yet, the budget – even for cloud-based, SaaS providers like ScreenCloud – often sits with IT. 

Securing IT buy-in for implementing a digital signage solution can be challenging. IT professionals’ pain points and priorities differ from HR’s, and it’s important to ‘speak their language’ when selling the benefits of digital signage, or convincing your IT team to switch to a new provider. 

In this blog, we'll help you build a strong business case for digital signage and present it to IT in a way that showcases how it meets the common goals of both departments.

Emphasize the value and ROI of employee engagement 

Showcase how the solution can deliver targeted, timely, and relevant information and content to employees at scale; and why better internal communication is important. 

Organizations with engaged employees report 81% less absenteeism, 43% less turnover, 28% less theft, and 64% fewer safety incidents. Gallup.

Digital signage is an effective tool to not only improve employee communication; but drive return-on-investment business-wide. 

When requesting approval for procurement, start by explaining how digital signage can:

Improve internal communication and information sharing

Foster a sense of belonging and recognition

Support training and development initiatives

Be sure to provide real-life examples and success stories from other organizations in your industry that have adopted digital signage. For example:

“ScreenCloud has given us an authentic voice as a business, as it amplifies a variety of voices…. the variety reflects the business.”

”One way to encourage building our culture was to share with everybody what's going on in the company, showing the good work we're doing, the diversity of our employee-owners and the jobs that we work on.”

Read Choate Construction’s Customer Success Story

“ScreenCloud makes it very simple to push out digital messaging internally to end-users. It’s a great way for us to make sure that all the different teams here see the same important information. It’s completely solved our internal communication problem.”

The link between digital signage and digital transformation

Building the digital workplace of the future is on most enterprise IT leaders’ to-do lists – especially post-pandemic. So why are many enterprise organizations still relying on mass emails, noticeboards and word-of-mouth for functional communication? 

Displaying comms and content on screens supports digitization initiatives like going paperless, and, more importantly; bridges the gap between knowledge and deskless or frontline workers by providing them with comparable DEXs. (The latter group often lacks access to company email accounts or personal digital devices on the job.) 

Investing in digital signage accelerates digital transformation, which can be defined as a combination of procuring the right technology as well as adopting the right mindset at leadership level – a mindset that goes beyond an adapt-to-survive reactivity.

Third-party cybersecurity risk remains a major concern for IT teams, who will be rightly worried about the security and data privacy credentials of any new technology introduced into the organization. 

It's essential to demonstrate that your chosen digital signage vendor takes security just as seriously as they do. We recommend addressing the following topics:

Data encryption during transmission and storage

Audit logging for ‘top-down’ oversight 

Regular security audits and vulnerability assessments

Compliance with industry standards and regulations

Secure authentication methods and single sign-on (SSO) capabilities

By providing this information proactively, you can alleviate IT's concerns and showcase your digital signage solution as a secure option for your organization.

ScreenCloud’s SOC 2, Type 2 compliant digital signage software provides enterprise-grade security; so IT can approve use for multiple business units with confidence. 

Demonstrate ease of use and low IT maintenance requirements

One of the main concerns when it comes IT modernization and new digital solutions is the amount of time and resources required for maintenance and support. They don’t want to own content creation or have to troubleshoot and fix the smallest of things; and fair enough! 

To tackle this issue, highlight the following aspects of your chosen digital signage platform:

Intuitive user interface and user-friendly content management system

Pre-built templates and lockable design elements 

Drag-and-drop functionality for content creation

Automated content scheduling and distribution

Remote management, monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities

By emphasizing these features, you can show IT that your digital signage solution is easy to use and will not create additional workload or tickets for their team. 

Read 10 must-have features for enterprise-grade digital signage 

Demonstrate integrations and extensibility

Your IT team will likely be interested in tech stack consolidation, and how your digital signage solution can integrate with existing systems and applications. Present the integrations offered by your digital signage vendor and explain how they can streamline workflows and improve efficiency.

Some popular integrations to mention include:

Internal communication tools (e.g., Slack, Microsoft Teams)

Corporate intranet and content repositories

Business Intelligence tools (e.g. Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, Grafana) 

Furthermore; so IT can make your chosen digital signage solution truly their own; discuss the availability of APIs and the configurability and extensibility of the digital signage platform. 

This will give your IT team peace of mind that the solution can be customized to fit their tech stack and workflows, and the organization’s use case. 

Demonstrate reliability and access to support 

There’s nothing worse than broken, black or blue screens. ScreenCloud’s Service Level Agreement (SLA) includes a 99.99% uptime guarantee. 

IT teams also need to know that they’re not alone when dealing with any issues with the screen network. ScreenCloud provides 24/5 professional support in every timezone, a dedicated Customer Success Manager for enterprise customers, and higher-touch support – everything from training to content strategy.

View ScreenCloud Professional ServicesScreenCloud Professional Services 

One of the main benefits of choosing a SaaS provider like ScreenCloud versus on-premise digital signage is speed of deployment. According to Apptio, 92% of IT leaders prefer the Cloud to on-prem. 

The benefits are many and varied: organizations save money and reduce CAPEX by avoiding the cost of buying and maintaining servers. There’s no need to worry about downtime because your data always gets backed up. You’re able to scale up and down as required – fast. Finally, teams can access and manage content from any device at any time. 

Hardware-agnosticism is also something to look out for. Software that works with any hardware – for digital signage, that means screens, TVs or monitors and media players – is preferred by IT. 

ScreenCloud offers ‘software-first digital signage for any hardware’. Work with what you’ve got, or select from a wide range of professional and consumer-grade options dependent on your use case.

ScreenCloud is also operating system-agnostic. Your IT team can run ScreenCloud on any OS, but for larger or complex deployments, we recommend our proprietary ScreenCloud OS. 

Dubbed ‘the missing operating system for screens’, it comes with the enterprise-grade security features and performance IT leaders expect, at a highly competitive price point. 

Are you ready to improve employee engagement with ‘screens that communicate’?

ScreenCloud helps teams in 9,000+ organizations around the world communicate with those who matter most, using the screens on their walls and the content  in their systems. 

ScreenCloud’s digital signage can inform employees on corporate information like social media feeds, data visualizations, emergency alerts, and live broadcasts – or even simply the news, sports and weather. 

Sign up for a free demo and see what your organization can achieve with digital signage.

You’re an HR leader set on adding employee-facing screens to your internal communications channel mix… great! Here’s how to build a business case for IT, and position your chosen digital signage solution as one that meets the needs of both departments.

How to get IT buy-in for a digital signage solution

How it works:

How to get IT buy-in for a digital signage solution

How to get IT buy-in for a digital signage solution

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