Digital Asset Management: Big Content in a Challenging Landscape

Abstract

Organizations seeking to improve operational efficiency, information security and cost savings pursue these goals by researching, selecting and implementing Content Management Systems.

Content Management Systems (CMS) have been around for several decades at the enterprise level, driven by the massive digitization of day to day business. Back office applications of CMS - manufacturing, order processing and finance - have matured, and the legacy software systems continue to evolve towards Front office capabilities for digital marketing and customer experience. At the same time, there has been a huge surge of competition among vendors and offerings, especially as acceptance of cloud-based platforms has advanced.

At the heart of all CMS systems, which go by dozens of acronyms as hundreds (if not thousands) of vendors seek to differentiate their products, is Digital Asset Management. DAM is the metadata engine that enables everything to be found - digitally, and quickly. The eponymous ‘Google’ search is the premier example of the everyday power of DAM.

No business, of course, wants its proprietary information to show up in a public search, and companies have policies and infrastructure to keep their business intelligence secure. This has a side effect, however, of silo-ing information and assets: when different departments have different access to infrastructure, there is only limited ability to search across the entire organization. In practice, workers tend to store files locally on hard drive, on their department’s intranet, and collaborate via email and consumer cloud services like Drop Box. This results in a massive amount of duplication - of files, of searches, of work – and inefficiency.

DAM's core competencies of store, search and share go a long way towards increasing productivity and streamlining workflow bottlenecks. Digital search is a significant part of nearly every employee’s workday; one study shows that employees spend about 19% of every week searching for information; another shows that a third of that search time is spent asking another employee for that information.

And when the assets involved are large file size digital media - photos, graphics, audio and video (which also need to be managed in a multitude of formats) - the impact on time and workflow increases enormously. Any company involved in creating these kinds of assets for delivery knows the painfulness of air date and deadline, as does every company with a mission-critical interest in reaching their customers with 'rich media' marketing.

Introducing DAM is complex, as it involves numerous stakeholders, creates new workflows, and can encounter resistance to adoption. Understanding the goals of the organization, and its employees’ day to day workflows, is critical to successful planning and deployment of DAM. In the end, implementing DAM can increase productivity, and save companies time and money.

Keywords: DAM, Digital Asset Management, Content Management Systems, CMS