When bringing digital asset management (DAM) into and organization, few companies consider the area of “Business Support”.  Business Support is defined as the extended organizational infrastructure (people, organizational structures, and technology/systems) that is needed to maintain both the proper functioning of the DAM as it relates to the business (i.e., how the DAM maps to the business, validating proposed changes to the system, adding new capabilities, rolling out to new users, etc.), and the proper governance and communication around the DAM across your extended organization.

Business support is critical to the successful use of DAM in an organization.  However most organizations fail to fully comprehend what is required or needs to be put in place to make a DAM deployment successful.  Furthermore, when considering the total cost of ownership for a DAM, it is frequently a common unaccounted cost.

Business support is an organizational cost and an organizational concern.  While business support is absolutely essential and required in global companies with multiple regional users (e.g. a global product or services company, manufacturer, consumer product provider or media/entertainment company) or for that matter any company that works with Ad agencies on a global basis, it is also essential for small- and medium-sized organizations to establish an appropriate business support infrastructure and business support team for the DAM.

Business support includes the DAM Masters and training roles referred to in the previous blog post.  However, it expands beyond those to include the expanded team of people that play a role in supporting the DAM, as it affects a wide swath of an organization – from the creative teams, through marketing and agency partners, to global sales teams, partners, suppliers, and various outlets or consumers.

What tools and infrastructure are required to successfully support the business use of a DAM system in an organization?

First, keep in mind that organizations can use a variety of organizational structures to support a digital asset management system, especially if it is on a global, enterprise-wide or broad basis (e.g., it integrates with one or more external agencies, partners, distributors, retailers, etc.)  Here are three approaches.  The first two are common.  The third one is new:

1. An organization might employ a structure that uses regional experts who provide business level support in the local language, and serve as contacts between the region’s end users and the DAM Masters, funneling requests inward, and answers and education outward.
2. The organization establishes a cross-functional team including IT, marketing, agency members, regional experts and others.
3. Outsource the business support function to a third-party who provides the DAM Masters, training and more back to the entire organization as a managed service.

Your choice will depend on a number of factors:

1. The structure and size of the business support organization required for your sized organization
2. The degree to which automation can be employed instead of or in addition to people
3. Your budget
4. Your ability to create the DAM Master role internally
5. Your ability to put in place the necessary internal organizational structure

Different structures work better for different organizations.  But regardless of the approach and structure chosen, both people and automation are required.  A good communication infrastructure is required, to communicate changes and education outward, and gather requests and needs inward.  Presentation and messaging tools, a help desk and online help, as well as best practice techniques will facilitate the training and education requirements.  Policies, protocols, survey tools, focus groups, emails and forums or internal blogs will facilitate requirements gathering.  All of these are part and parcel of the DAM business support function. And as can be seen from these statements, because of the variance in how organizations may implement business support, its cost can vary widely.

While there is no “right way” to provide business support for DAM, there are best practices (which is a topic for another post). One best practice, however, is setting up the business support function in the first place.  It is essential that it be set up and implemented, and for that matter, budgeted and accounted for as a critical expense, if you want your DAM to be successful.  This requires executive sponsorship and at least initial oversight.  It then requires ongoing attention, to assure it is being effectively provided.  Often the DAM Master(s) performs this function.

One related statement must be made here: Digital asset management is fundamentally different than content or web content management, and it requires a different support structure (and training).  This is so frequently misunderstood by people in organizations who think they can apply their Web content management (WCM) knowledge and skill sets to DAM and be successful.  In general, they can’t because DAM is distinctly different. What a digital asset management system does, how it functions, what it needs to be successful are all different from that of a Web CMS.   Perhaps an existing WCM support infrastructure can be utilized, but it doesn’t substitute for one that is dedicated to the DAM and the workflows, business processes, training, etc. that are required for its success across the extended enterprise.

In summary, DAM Business Support is critical to establish and maintain.  It is essential to the success of any DAM, and often the area that kills DAM or media asset management (MAM) efforts if it is not properly addressed and furthermore, supported with senior management sponsorship and ongoing support. Lastly, it’s one of 13 costs for a digital asset management system, and one cost that is frequently unaccounted for in both initial planning or ongoing support.

Almost every successful digital asset management (DAM) installation (hosted/SaaS DAM or on premise) has a resident DAM expert or “DAM Master”.  Depending on the size and breadth of the organization this person or sometimes a team of 2-3 people, provides oversight of the DAM system from a combined business use and technical implementation perspective.

In most organizations, this role is often divided between several people (e.g. technically focused vs. business focused) who work as the DAM Masters or governing council, to make sure the organization has smooth and ongoing system operation.

They are not necessarily IT people, because they need to understand how the DAM is applied to the business and across groups including potentially external agencies, partners, and users. Nor are they strictly marketing folk assigned to babysit the DAM, as they also have to understand, sometimes technically, how the DAM works and how to get things accomplished with it.  The DAM Master is thus a core person or team, and needs to be able to understand both the business needs, workflows and processes of the DAM’s various stakeholders, as well as the technical architecture and capabilities of the DAM system.  In essence, these people “own the DAM” and are responsible for its proper function, use, maintenance and success within the organization.

Their key responsibilities are:

• Solicit, vet and resolve all enhancement requests and modifications to the system
• Expand and update the metadata model and definitions (assuming the system supports the capability to update the metadata model after it has been established)
• Enforce consistency of metadata (“metadata quality assurance”) – are people using the same terms, controlled vocabulary, keywords, etc. to describe the assets so they can be found later?
• Implement and update the folder/collection/catalog hierarchy for consistent access
• Implement new business rules, policies, and in some cases automated workflows within the system to facilitate business processes around the system
• Function as more than a librarian or governance provider for the assets
• Potentially manage user organization and access to functionality in the system
• Potentially provide internal training and problem resolution as well

With this lengthy but essential introduction, the key question is: Do you have the right people in your organization to serve as DAM Masters in the first place?  You must ask and assess this critical question.  It’s very important, because it directly affects three of the hidden costs of DAM: initial training, ongoing training and business support.

If your organization is like most, you don’t have these key people on staff and instead have to hire them.  Or perhaps you do have some people with relevant skill sets, but they’ll need to be “grown” and trained.  In some cases organizations outsource these skills/roles from a third-party (e.g., a system integrator), or from the DAM vendor.

Once you identify who is going to be your DAM Master(s), you can identify this hidden cost – whether it will be new headcount, outsourced headcount or service, or purely training fees for those few key people in your organization.  Establishing the DAM Master role is critical success factor for your organization’s use of a DAM – without it, it is highly likely your DAM project will wither and die, because no-one “owns” the DAM along with the requisite skills to manage and expand its use.

For more on calculating the total cost of DAM and finding out more about some of the hidden costs of DAM, download the North Plains’ white paper “The 13 Cost Areas for a Digital Asset Management System”.

One of the biggest challenges facing brands as social media platforms continue to evolve is that of brand consistency.  In the “old” world, marketers defined messaging and images they felt were most representative of their brand.   On the social internet, the community defines the message and may begin to define the images.  How do Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems fit into this?  They are the central repository for a company’s digital media assets.

As companies intentionally reach out to their communities for input, this input will come in many formats. Brands may invite consumers to create new tag lines.   It may come as pictures of users with the product.  It may come in the form of home video extolling product benefits.  Consumer brands are actively seeking user generated content, partly to attract attention to the brand, partly to gain low/no cost re-usable content and partly to test the waters.

Platforms such as YouTube, Flickr and Vimeo are growing outlets for company created content but also for brand requested user generated content.  This user generated content may not comply with corporate defined brand image.  How do brands address this?  Or by ‘crowd sourcing” content, do brands give up control of brand identity?  The goal for many marketing teams is to create content that can be repurposed across multiple distribution channels and create tighter bonds with their customers.  Regardless of their intent, how do companies manage and repurpose user generated assets?

DAM systems can help companies manage these assets.   Any DAM solution provides the ability to define the ontology and taxonomy of digital assets.  It is possible to create additional categories which identify the assets as user generated, associated with a specific campaign or of certain image quality. DAM systems may also begin to incorporate social concepts such as the tag cloud, which shows the tags associated with specific assets.  They could also incorporate features such as reviews & comments, helping marketing departments identify the most popular or useful content.

A digital asset management system cannot control a company’s brand, but it can help that company manage the digital media assets related to the brand.  The system provides the company with a tool to review, assess, edit and manage assets with the intent to determine the asset’s alignment with brand image.  It then enables companies to extend their brand across multiple channels (i.e., mobile, internet, print, TV, etc.) through re-use and re-purpose of the selected asset(s).  Bottom line, digital asset management systems will have to integrate and manage professionally produced assets as well as those imported from social platforms.

In this world of all things social, there is a lot of focus on making existing platforms social.  As an example, there have been many discussions about social CRM.  While salesforce.com is considered to be social, traditional systems (i.e., Oracle) are not.  A simple definition of social CRM is “having a discussion when, where and how the customer wants it.”  Coming from a world of digital media, should we be talking about Social Digital Asset Management systems? Should users be able to access or provide digital assets when, where and how they want?   Is this an oxymoron or redundant?  Let’s review what functions a DAM system performs.

DAM systems evolved to address the challenges facing organizations who manage a variety of digital assets.  In an enterprise business, these assets would traditionally be managed by the marketing department.  They would include corporate logos & images.  If anyone outside of the marketing department needed these images, for any reason, they needed to go through the marketing department to gain access to these assets.  This could be a slow process with many bottlenecks.

Digital Asset Management systems evolved to provide a central repository for digital assets.  As these assets have evolved beyond static images into rich media assets incorporating audio and video, DAM systems became more elegant in how they addressed issues of tagging, metadata, taxonomy, ontology and overall semantics.  DAM systems, by necessity, must be easily integrated with other systems such as editing, transcoding, storage, digital rights and distribution.

Today, DAM systems are accessible by users across the enterprise, whenever they want.  Marketing may own the responsibility for establishing a corporate wide policy for tagging, metadata, etc., but groups such as sales, engineering, product management have access to the company’s digital media assets.  There is still separation between producers and consumers.  Does providing access make the system social?  Or does it become social when those same groups can become producers and contribute their own content and assets?

Perhaps a DAM system with the ability to annotate, rank and comment on these assets makes it social within the enterprise.  Or, perhaps it’s the option for online, interactive communication that facilitates effective collaboration.  System features now enable uses to rank assets or for managers to understand how many times an asset is viewed partly or in full, DAM systems provide intelligence and elements of social platforms.  DAM systems continue to evolve and incorporate features that feel social.  Perhaps they are as these capabilities are core components of many social sites and platforms.

The ability for a DAM system to accept and manage user generated content (UGC) is increasingly important.  If companies recognize the social web as a relevant content distribution outlet, they may also need to consider it as a source of content input.  The DAM system can become more social by enabling content upload and the assignment of relevant tags, metadata by establishing and automating a standard taxonomy and ontology.  Thus the DAM enables users to access all digital media assets for the company, when, where and how they like.

I was recently asked:

Is there anything you can share about how the file management needs differ from the way a publisher use a DAM?  I would think there would be a lot more transfers of very files (i.e. high resolution print-ready PDFs) and much, much less internal activity involving small files (i.e. photos, production files, etc.)

In general, yes, printers are working with and transferring large print-ready files.  Some of these can be hundreds of megabytes in size and so there can be significant concern in working with clients around bandwidth and the time it takes to send and upload the file.  However, internally on a local network, the size of the file is less of an issue.  But in general they tend to work with whole files and less frequently with the individual pieces — unless they’re doing specific touch up and color correction work on individual assets contained in the final work.

However, in some cases, printers provide DAM as a service to their clients.  They manage the assets on behalf of the client, providing browser-based access to not just the final print ready files, but in some cases the QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign layouts, and both the hi- and low-res components (e.g., photos, graphics, images, fonts, etc.).  In this way, DAM allows them to offer additional or “value-added” services to their clients.

Publishers are a bit different.  They generally use DAM as an internal repository to maintain all of the elements in the publication (e.g., magazine or book), as well as the layout file, and the finished work.  So they are often working with both the large and the smaller files.   However it can vary across publishers. In some cases, a DAM is used as an integral part of the editorial process – where work in progress, all the individual components as well as the layouts and versions of both are kept.  Others may use DAM primarily for storage and distribution management of finished works.  Some use it for both.

Note that “Publishers” may also be either magazine or book publishers.  Magazine publishers typically have a broader range of content than book publishers (so far… but this is changing too) as they often have both print and Web versions of their content, have needs to support both workflows (which are different), and may have exclusive content for the web or mobile devices (e.g., video, audio, and other rich media hanging around) that is updated more frequently. The DAM provides a common repository for feeding both kinds of workflows, for grouping and categorizing related content, for finding other relevant assets that could be used in a developing story, and for distributing to both a web content management system (Web CMS) as well as to individuals, partners, channels, video streaming servers or mobile distribution platforms.

As well, for magazines in particular, they may be working with purchased or rights-controlled images, so managing the expiration and use of them in a publication or publications is critical.  Using an image out of its purchased rights can be extremely costly.  So the DAM helps in a way that printers typically don’t use it. In summary, publishing use is potentially a broader set of use cases, media types, workflows and file sizes (e.g. working with large video files… at least the initial master versions before they’re reformatted or transcoded for distribution).

Book publishers are typically working with a more limited range of content — photos, images, graphics, and fonts.  Now, as eBooks begin to incorporate more interactivity, the book publishing workflows and asset management challenges move towards those of magazine, web publishing and potentially “interactive applications”, and will require working with and managing a broader range of file types, components and workflows.

Lastly, note that print and publishing workflows vary a bit as well.  Print may use the assets in touchup, color correction and other pre-press workflows, perhaps with some limited review and approval with the client.  Publishers often use it in creative as well as review and approval workflows, and distribution workflows — which may embargo information until a set date and release it directly to particular people, partners or distribution channels (including to web sites and direct mobile devices).  It can be used this way too for print and eBooks books, where the distribution processes may include direct to the consumer and more frequent updates.

Feel free to keep the questions coming.

Global marketing is a challenge, regardless of the size of the company. In order to communicate with your customers and prospect you have to have the right content, in the right format, where the customer or prospect wants to consume it. The “right content” means that the pictures, text, videos, audio, messaging and more are appropriate for each region, geography, demographic or culture, and device. In regulated industries, like pharmaceutical and medical devices, it also has to comply with various regulations. Even within a country such as here in the US, how do you make sure that you’re marketing snow shovels in winter in New England while you’re marketing swimsuits and golf clubs in Florida and Arizona?

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After spending a week in Las Vegas at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show it’s clear that the demand for managing video – often referred to as “Media Asset Management” (MAM) and for managing all kinds of digital files “Digital Asset Management” (DAM) — has grown substantially in the past year.

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