The National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) is Australia’s premier audiovisual archive and a place of engagement with Australian audiovisual production both past and present. 

In late 2018, the NFSA sought to better understand the way in which cloud-based technologies could help it deliver against its mission. With a considerable digitisation effort already underway the NFSA wanted to explore the potential for refined operating approaches enabled by digital transformation to help meet its commitment to Deadline 2025. 

Pragma was selected to build a conceptual model and use it as a basis to begin to scaffold solution elements to accelerate the agency’s evaluation of different cloud technologies and to highlight areas for improvement on existing processes. 

In conjunction with the NFSA, Pragma conducted a series lightweight workshops and conceptual modelling exercises to understand how existing analogue and digital processes might be better supported by its technology. This was a lean exercise intended to provoke discussion around the digital transformation initiatives and approaches available to the agency. 

The outputs of the workshops were then used to create a lean conceptual model reflecting existing processes and proposed changes enabled by commodity cloud technologies. This was provided to illustrate what a digital-first operating model might look like for them. 

NFSA were equipped with a better understanding of potential cloud technologies that could underpin their transformation. Our work was the catalyst for a series of broader internal discussions around digital transformation, and the agency’s priorities in evolving their operations, while exploring new product opportunities afforded by cloud-based technologies. Key capabilities were outlined, as well as particular initiatives and projects required to develop custom capabilities that would integrate the agency’s media asset management with a new, ‘ingest-first’ digital operating model.