Kearney Australia’s Robert Harriss highlights importance of adaptable broadcast infrastructure

He underscored how strategic operations are shifting from cost optimisation to building adaptability and sustainable advantage.

Broadcasters are faced with the pressure to rethink how they operate, compete, and scale amidst the streaming ecosystems, AI integration, and shifting audience behaviours that reshape the media landscape. This industry advances with rapidly evolving technology and tightening content economics; hence, operational agility is becoming just as important as creative capability.

Offering insight into this transformation is Robert Harriss, who leads the Strategic Operations Practice for Australia and New Zealand at Kearney. He has been with the firm for nearly two decades and has advised leading organisations, including major media and broadcast companies. His areas of expertise include strategic operations, performance improvement, digital procurement, AI adoption, and operating model transformation.

During the last decade, he has worked closely with broadcasters, navigating broadcast value chain modernisation, technology and operations digitisation, portfolio profitability, and low-cost operating model design. His work also focuses on helping organisations modernise operations and co-design scalable solutions with technology partners to create long-term competitive advantage.

As a judge for the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting+ Awards 2026, Harriss shared his perspectives on the evolving broadcast landscape, the operational challenges within it, and the qualities that drive innovation in the industry.

Having spent nearly two decades at Kearney, how has your approach to strategic operations evolved amidst disruptions in the media and broadcast sectors?

When I started in consulting, strategic operations were largely about finding efficiency within a stable value chain — negotiating better supplier terms, outsourcing, and tightening procurement. The fundamentals haven't changed, but the context has transformed enormously. In media and broadcasting, the disruption isn't just technological — it's structural. Revenue models, audience relationships, and the very definition of what a "broadcaster" does have all shifted.

What's evolved in my approach is the emphasis on designing inherently adaptive operations. Historically, broadcasters built their operations around them, largely owning an end-to-end value chain. That doesn't work anymore. Broadcasters are now thinking about their operations through a ‘core competency’ lens (what to own, where to partner) and a customer ownership lens (new revenue engines and ecosystems needed to activate). We now spend much more time helping clients build the operating models needed to respond to change and manage the ever-growing cost of content, rather than just optimising what exists today. It's less about perfecting the machine and more about making sure the machine is agile enough to profitably adapt.

What part of the value chain is currently the most under-optimised by Asia Pacific broadcasters?

Without question, it's the middle layer — what I'd call the content supply chain and operations infrastructure. Broadcasters in this region have invested heavily at both ends: content acquisition and ingest on one side, and audience-facing platforms and marketing on the other. But the systems and workflows connecting them — rights management, asset management, scheduling, and post-production — are often a patchwork of legacy systems, manual handoffs, siloed teams, and generally low on automation.

That inefficiency has a real cost, both financial and in terms of speed to market. In an environment where content windows are compressing and multi-platform delivery is the norm, operational drag in the middle of the chain becomes a genuine competitive liability. We've worked with broadcasters who are sitting on significant cost reduction and productivity gains by bringing discipline and modern tooling to that middle layer — and they're often surprised by how much there is.

As traditional broadcasting converges with streaming ecosystems, how should regional broadcasters rethink their operating models?

The instinct for many broadcasters has been to treat streaming as an add-on and to leverage existing infrastructure. That approach made sense initially, but it's increasingly a strategic liability. The two operating models have fundamentally different economics, cadences, and capability requirements.

What we're advising clients to do now is to think about how to maintain a two-speed operating model, making conscious decisions on where to invest and, importantly, where not to invest. It starts with having a very clear view of customer segments and what drives customer profitability. Streaming ecosystems need to be future-ready and economically scalable. Traditional broadcasting needs to be more ‘run for cash.

The last piece of the puzzle needs to be on convergence and identifying which capabilities — data and audience, content, infrastructure, etc. — need to sit as a stable core versus what needs to be tailored closer to the customer. It also means being honest about what broadcasters won't be able to do themselves and structuring partnerships accordingly, leveraging partners to scale and to provide access to new technology.

What risks should broadcasters be mindful of as they accelerate digitisation and AI integration?

The risks I see most frequently aren't the ones that make headlines. The headline risk is always data security, piracy and AI ethics — and those are real — but a more immediate danger for many broadcasters is transformation fatigue and incrementalism. When organisations accelerate digitisation without a coherent operating model to support it, you end up with a proliferation of point solutions, shadow IT, and teams that are technically "digital" but operationally disconnected. Conversely, taking a conservative approach manages change but risks having a much higher-cost solution in the long run and one that never fully captures the full digitisation benefits.

The second risk I'd flag is hanging on to sunk costs and legacy investments. I’d argue there remains a lot of outdated infrastructure which will require structural and regulatory change to fully remove. It can sometimes be hard to create the business case to write off technology costs; however, I’ve seen time and again businesses not being able to fully capture new advertising and customer insights revenue streams because of a tech stack that is simply not able to keep up with modern data requirements.

Lastly, there is capability debt. Broadcasters are investing in technology, but many haven't matched that with investment in the human capabilities to govern, manage, and get genuine value from it. Technology without the operational and analytical capability to use it well rarely delivers its promised return. An operating model that sees digital as a separate function rather than a new way of working will ultimately establish incorrect and inefficient reporting lines and metrics.

How should broadcasters future-proof their technology architecture to remain adaptable to major market shifts?

The principle I keep coming back to is composability. Broadcasters should be wary of any architecture that requires a large, integrated platform replacement every time the market shifts — because in this sector, the market will keep shifting. The goal is to build a stack where individual components can be updated, replaced, or reconfigured without needing to rebuild the whole system.

Practically, that means being thoughtful about where you own versus where you integrate; being disciplined about data portability and interoperability; and treating vendor relationships as strategic rather than purely transactional. It also means keeping a genuine view of your total cost of ownership over time — not just the upfront investment. Cloud migration is a good example: the flexibility gains are real, but only if the commercial model and governance around it are structured carefully.

The broadcasters who will be most adaptable are those who combine a modular technical architecture with strong internal capability to manage it — that combination is what allows you to move quickly when the market demands it. The market is moving quickly in this space, from point solutions not that long ago to fully integrated offers that allow you to stand up and monetise content and channels quickly and cost-effectively.

As a judge for the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting+ Awards 2026, what qualities or innovations do you consider essential when evaluating nominees?

What I'm looking for above all else is impact with intent. There's no shortage of innovation in the industry — technology vendors are constantly introducing new capabilities, and content offerings are becoming increasingly omni-channel — but the nominees that stand out are those who have taken a clear-eyed view of a problem, made a deliberate choice about how to address it, and can demonstrate a meaningful outcome as a result. And importantly, I’m looking for new ideas – IP tech and omni-channel experiences have been around for a whilst, but I’ve been impressed by nominees that can capture these efficiently and effectively to provide greater access to better content for larger and/or more diverse audiences. The ideas that have stood out for me were those that were better able to connect storytelling via new technologies.

I'm also particularly interested in how nominees think about scalability and sustainability. An innovation that works in a single market or a single workflow is encouraging; one that has been designed from the outset to scale across the organisation or has genuinely changed how a broadcaster operates structurally is exceptional.

Finally, I look for evidence of genuine integration between business and operational thinking. The best examples of broadcasting innovation aren't purely technical achievements — they reflect an understanding of the commercial model, the audience relationship, and the operational context in which the technology sits. That combination of strategic clarity and operational execution is what separates good from truly excellent.