Does My Company Need a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system?

Chief Marketer has a brief story in their Technology section about Ford’s commitment to a digital asset management (DAM) system. The story is worth following up on because many Fortune 500 companies with multiple brands, multiple products and numerous consultants and vendors should be following Ford’s example.

DAMs are not new. They’ve been around for some years and were initially used by media companies who needed to manage an extraordinary number of digital assets being used in print, TV and/or the web. Having a DAM makes it easier to find a video clip or an image that can be inserted into a TV segment or print ad.

As analog has given way to digital and the number of digital assets within every organization has grown, DAMs have become much more relevant to the marketing / communications departments of non-media organizations. With different agencies managing different elements of your brand, DAMs can help ensure that each group has access to the right asset at the right time.

Want to know if your organization should be considering a DAM? There are a few questions you can ask yourself:

• Does my company have thousands of brand assets managed by numerous departments and/or vendors in various geographic locations?
• Is my company challenged to verify we have the rights to use some assets in our existing asset library?
• Is there potential for numerous organizational groups to reuse our digital assets across multiple communications channels?
• Is the process / workflow for attaining access to digital assets convoluted, confusing, frustrating or improvised?

If your answer to any of these questions is yes, your company might be a good candidate for a digital asset management system.

There are many vendors who provide digital asset management software. Options range from open-source products like EnterMedia and FocusOPEN to enterprise products like Open Text’s Artesia DAM, North Plains’ Telescope and Canto Cumulus. Which one is right for you? That depends on the scale and type of asset management challenge your company faces.

Some things to keep in mind as you explore DAMs:

• If using the DAM to deploy assets to your web site, the DAM should integrate with your company’s existing web or enterprise content management system.
• Even more important than having the DAM in place is having an asset management workflow that makes sense for your organization. Think about ideal use cases for managing assets within your organization. The DAM you choose should be able to come close to matching those use cases.
• The DAM must be able to support your environment. Be careful not to choose a DAM that does not support every file in your organization.
• Rome wasn’t conquered in a day. It’s not necessary to deploy the DAM throughout your entire organization as soon as it’s ready. Instead, develop a rollout schedule and use feedback from your early-adopters to tweak the system as you roll it out to other parts of the organization.

Good luck!

Potentially useful links:

What is the best digital asset management product?
Building the DAM
Enterprise Information Watch’s DAM channel
Insight Community case on DAMs
Making the Case for Digital Asset Management
DPS Magazine’s Assessing Digital Asset Management