Localised Supply & Centralised Distribution Of Digital Assets

October 11, 2007 – 3:09 pm

Delegate Management AND Retain Control

The majority of corporations are divided into business units that relate to the type of service and/or sector that is being supplied.  Each may also be split into horizontal or vertical segments.

Some Digital Asset Management systems are built around a simplistic model which assumes that a centralised team will take full responsibility for supplying assets and ‘policing’ the catalogue.  However, in larger conglomerates, designating a single group to manage all materials produced across the business is often impracticable.

Removal of the opportunity for any local management of digital assets usually results in the staff who are responsible becoming over-stretched, burdened with a heavy cataloguing workload and a backlog of usage approval requests that they struggle to clear.  If assets are not quickly made available to users, individual business units may start to hoard files, or worse still commission their own catalogues, frustrated at the time taken from submission to publication of assets via the central system.

To avoid these problems, an effective DAM system needs to mirror the nature of the business itself by providing a system that enables both:

  • A centralised distribution of assets via a common core platform that all staff and external agencies can participate in.
  • Localised management of assets so that those with the most subject-specific expertise about assets can decide if they are suitable and how they should be catalogued.

This means that the department commissioning the DAM system (in liaison with the business units) can set the overall features, functionality and workflows (i.e. chain of command) but that individual business units can take ownership for the supply and management of their own assets.  This distributed workload better ensures that assets are supplied and approved within a reasonable timeframe.

By Ralph Windsor | Posted in Digital Media Supply Chain | Comments Off

Build Digital Asset Catalogues That Reflect The Needs Of Your Business

September 24, 2007 – 5:08 pm

…and avoid being shoe horned by solution vendors!

One of the most important factors for any Digital Asset Management Solution is how quickly and with what degree of accuracy users are able to find media that matches their needs. To achieve this, assets should be catalogued in a predictable and conventional manner, reflective of the business sector and culture of the organisation where they are to be used.

This advice is so obvious and simple as to be almost intuitive, yet you would be surprised at the number of occasions it is ignored by vendors and buyers of DAM solutions alike. There are a lot of reasons why this is the case, but the chief one is the vendor’s reluctance to customise their product for different sectors. In this post, I will explain why this scenario occurs and how you can avoid it happening to you.

Media assets rarely fit neatly into straightforward categories and often cross multiple business units, departments and projects. Frequently assets can be re-used to avoid the need for re-originating new material. It is therefore not suitable to associate assets with just one category, but necessary to allow for multiple categorisation to produce the best search results

The approach taken by many DAM systems to provide targeted search facilities to is to use multi-level keyword hierarchies. These are popular with commercial asset libraries, here is construction related example:

Health & Safety

Protective Clothing

Fluorescent Jacket

The context of the asset is therefore provided by the keywords themselves, rather than the system. So, if one were to swap the terms used, it is quick and easy to reapply this to another different sector:

Film/Video

Children’s Entertainment

Cartoons

This is convenient for the developer of a DAM system as the problem of making the software fit the sector to which it is being applied becomes sub-contracted to the client’s users. Since it is presumed that they know the most about their business sector, they can determine the keywords and hierarchies used. Occasionally, a consultant may have developed an initial taxonomy and it is possible to purchase ‘off the shelf’ word lists from specialist firms to provide taxonomy framework.

The main problem is that these approaches do not work in a real-world corporate context. Why? Because most firms do not often have a dedicated, specialist team of asset cataloguers. Existing employees are often tasked with the responsibilities of asset cataloguing, in addition to their usual roles. Pressure to deliver projects and meet deadlines does not afford staff time to deliberate over the most appropriate and consistent keywords or categories.

During the projects Daydream has participated in, we have found that in keyword taxonomies containing hundreds of words, typically less than 10% will be actually used when staff are cataloguing assets. In most cases, staff will choose one or two words, and no others. Cataloguing also tends to be uneven as those with more time available will select more words. The common outcome is that assets with no real greater merit over others, end up being found in searches and used simply because they have been catalogued with more descriptive terms.

In my experience, ‘keywords’ is an unsuitable term. ‘Concepts’ is frequently more appropriate and a more realistic reflection of how much you can reasonably expect staff to do to help keep brand asset catalogues accurate and relevant. Rather than a complex hierarchy of terms, our method is to develop an inter-connected series of categories that users can choose quickly from pick-lists and drop-down menus. For example:

· Business Unit
· Markets
· Concept
· Services
· Project
· Country
· Language
· Clients

By using a sector and company specific approach, staff are provided with more guidance about how to catalogue the asset, and are therefore able to tag assets quickly and effectively.

It is clear that generic metadata hierarchies do not best serve the users and managers of corporate asset catalogues. Rather, users require relevant, business-related taxonomies, which they can easily understand. Any vendor of a DAM solution should be willing and able to customise the cataloguing system to match the needs of your business. Beware those who encourage you to ‘shoe horn’ asset metadata into an abstract method that suits their product. You may pay the consequences of a reduced ROI for the lifetime of the system.

For more about Controlled Vocabularies and metadata, read our article: Designing a Controlled Vocabulary for use with Brand Asset Libraries.

By Ralph Windsor | Posted in Digital Asset Management | Comments (0)

DAM Systems: The Ability To Handle Different Media

September 24, 2007 – 4:26 pm

Why Any And Many Don’t Mean The Same Thing
Having a DAM system that genuinely supports many different media is more complex than you would expect. There is a crucial difference between supporting a type of media and representing it.

Many systems fake their ability to offer handle multiple types of media by providing a ‘file manager’ style system that technically supports any kind of asset but fails to actually represent it. The reality is that these solutions are only fractionally more useful than a shared folder on a corporate file server.

Representing assets is a process of generating what are referred to as surrogate files so that users can view them before deciding to download the originals.

It should be possible to quickly and easily extend the range of media handled by a DAM system to meet need. It is almost inevitable that some kinds of obscure assets may require immediate support; Digital Asset Management solutions should allow generic file types to be supplied and also permit a representation (e.g. thumbnail) to be supplied to accompany the asset.

There are still some occasions where an asset might be in physical or analogue form. These could be legacy material like photographic transparencies, film or fine art. A DAM system should be adaptable to handle anything given to it and provide users with meaningful representations that are of genuine use when they are searching.

The FocusOPEN Digital Asset Management system supports fast-loading, high quality video previews, as shown here

The previewing of assets prior to download is essential for all assets, but particularly for media with large file sizes such as video. An effective DAM application will allow you to specify multiple preview sizes (if needed).

See the FocusOPEN product page if you want to find out more about a Digital Asset Management System that both supports and represents all types of asset.

By Ralph Windsor | Posted in DAM Systems | Comments (0)

Searching For Assets From A Single Repository

September 24, 2007 – 8:07 am

Why You Need Everything In One Place

Many of the earlier attempts at Digital Asset Management systems were heavily oriented towards images and photographs. Most were developed by software companies who targeted the stock image library market (in some cases they also ran their own libraries).

The range of assets used and generated in most marketing campaigns is more diverse than images alone. Historically, marketing staff would just have to make do with limited asset catalogues (especially when the media were in analogue formats). Now that nearly all new material is either created digitally or rapidly converted as a matter of course, there is no reason for having digital asset catalogues that do not allow staff access to all media in common use, via a single, searchable repository. As well as images, this should encompass all the media in use in the business: video, animation, office documents, print files, CAD/3D etc.

Having separate catalogues of assets supplied by different vendors and/or in-house applications will significantly dent the productivity of staff. Some features may be offered in one system but not in another, there will be confusion about where to download assets and which systems contains what.

It is true that there are some specialised databases where there is a proven need to hold assets in unique repositories (e.g. if the repository is crucial to the operation of the business and to change it would cause substantial disruption) but where possible it is preferable to integrate these together to reduce the confusion about where assets can be sourced from.

For more information on integrating Digital Asset Management, read the reports page of our site.

By Ralph Windsor | Posted in Digital Asset Management | Comments (0)

What Is Digital Asset Management?

August 7, 2007 – 10:43 am

An Introduction For Marketing Managers

This blog is about Digital Asset Management or “DAM” as it is often abbreviated to. In particular, it is concerned with how marketing managers can use DAM to gain greater control over their media and marketing collateral such as videos, images, print documents, fonts, audio, 3D models and other assets.

Digital Asset Management is both a strategy for leveraging greater value from a firm’s media assets and a description of software tools that enable the implementation of it, such as Daydream’s FocusOPEN.

DAM is also referred to via a range of other descriptions Digital Content Management (DCM) and Media Asset Management (MAM). These generally mean the same thing, however, there are a variety of sub-divisions or specialist DAM fields such as Brand Asset Management and Channel Asset Management.

Why bother managing digital assets? The main benefits can be summarised as follows:

  • Reduce costs by not re-generating material your organisation already owns.

  • Save time by helping users to find assets faster and providing assets instantly.

  • Reduce the risk of copyright breaches by making sure that staff are fully aware of restrictions before they use assets.

  • Increase collaboration across the organisation by pooling assets collectively.

  • Obtain greater control over your brand by supplying staff with assets that already adhere to your corporate style guidelines.

  • Preserve assets that may have value to the organisation (this could be both cultural as well as financial).

  • Generate revenue licencing assets to third parties.

Effective Digital Asset Management also involves adding metadata about each asset to enable them to be located later via searches. Metadata is tags or descriptive fields such as categories that help to differentiate one asset from another. Typically, a taxonomy or hierarchy needs to be considered that is relevant to each organisation’s industry sector, culture and corporate values.

There are a number of other technical considerations to be taken into account when considering DAM systems for corporate marketing departments. Normally, they will be hosted web based applications that users access via a browser. In this case, some consideration needs to be given as to whether to host the system internally or outsource everything to the vendor. This is decision that needs to be examined on a case by case basis. See our DAM hosting section for more details.

Two longer articles give more detail on what DAM is and how to implement it. 

Digital Asset Management: An Introduction For Marketing Managers

Digital Asset Management: Implementing A Strategy 

A lot of the terminology about Digital Asset Management is confusing for newcomers. To help those who may be confused by this subject, we have prepared a Digital Asset Management Glossary.

By Ralph Windsor | Posted in Digital Asset Management | Comments (0)