Digital Asset Management - It's More Than Just a Photo Album

By Troy Allen Nov 10, 2010

Digital Asset Management, or DAM, has been a buzz word for over a decade. Unfortunately, when I speak to clients about what it means for them, I get a wide variety of largely disappointing responses. Here's a look at what Digital Asset Management has become in 2010.

The most common response, and the one most distant from DAM’s true meaning, is that it is like a corporate album of all the organization's pictures and videos. Digital Rights Management is also a common part of their definition of DAM. This is certainly within the scope, but there's much more here.

Wikipedia defines DAM as something that "consists of management tasks and decisions surrounding the ingestion, annotation, cataloguing, storage, retrieval and distribution of digital assets. Digital photographs, animations, videos and music are samples of media asset management (a sub-category of DAM)”.

A Working Definition of DAM

A working definition of Digital Asset Management would be a process by which rich media files (graphics, photos, Flash, video, audio, etc.) are created, edited, stored and shared. We can then take that definition and break it down into 5 common tasks that will apply to all media files:

1. Creation

A half diligent search will turn up many applications in the market place for creating rich media. Most of these are geared towards individual users and most fall short of enterprise DAM needs.

In many organizations, creators will store their files locally during the creation process and then email them to other people to continue the refinement work, or store them on a shared file system and email the asset's location reference. In either case, the authoritative copy of the file can easily become lost as copies and versions proliferate.

A true Digital Asset Management solution allows content creators to store their work-in-process files in a single repository, apply security so that only a sub-set of the population can edit them, maintain complete revision history — including version rollbacks — and audit trails if necessary, and provide auto-rendering into different formats, enabling users to view the in-process files without having to launch a full-blown editing tool. In short, a good DAM solution facilitates a sane and governable process of creation.

2. Workflow

Content creators rarely work alone. Most asset creators view workflow as the process for creating the actual file.

In this case, workflow encompasses a much broader definition. Creators interact with other artists, have to have different levels of approval, and in some cases, might even need to be viewed and approved by legal departments before the images can be published.

Workflow has become an essential part of creating and managing digital assets. But not all workflows or organizations are the same. So, DAM systems should include a flexible workflow system which allows both pre-defined and ad-hock workflow paths.

Workflow participants should be able to edit (if part of the creative team), approve, comment, reject and provide escalations for time sensitive projects. Workflows are not just utilized during the creation and editing stage, but can be used to help drive storage requirements and the sharing or distribution of the files.

3. Management

It goes without saying that modern DAM systems must provide a common asset repository, but further still they should also include the ability to provide Life Cycle Management.

Life Cycle Management defines how long an item is kept active in a system, when it is moved to off-line or near-line storage, and when it is eventually deleted. Life Cycle management, working in conjunction with workflows, can help companies establish consistent review periods for their assets.