It seems like everything in the world of technology has to have an acronym associated with it in order to be accepted. Technology in the area of Digital Asset Management (DAM) now covers so much ground that concepts previously all lumped under “DAM” are now sub-dividing into more specific kinds of organizational concepts such as Media Asset Management (MAM) and Business Asset Management (BAM – my new favorite).

DAMs, MAMs and BAMs are easy buzzwords to get caught up in, but they’re hard to develop. Here is the beginning of my story.

I started developing our company’s first DAM tool with only the influence and vision to change one small but crucial corner of my employer’s workflow. A talented visionary by the name of Michael Smith and I started out from two different ends of the company to solve disparate issues. He was an editor who managed DVD distribution, and I was running the website technologies and trying to distribute all video to the wider digital world. We had a digital distribution problem that we quickly realized couldn’t be solved unless we dragged the entire production department out of tape and into a tapeless work environment.

This is a massive cultural and organizational transition that affects every aspect of a Production department. We launched the initial phase of our DAM designed by a company called Levels Beyond in August of 2011. Today, we are about halfway through the transition to a tapeless workflow.

Since the initial launch, I have been tasked to research and develop Asset Management workflows across nearly all departments in our organization – from Operations to Accounting – to keep track of myriad data shared by nearly every department for needs as varied as a current list of state-by-state commission phone numbers, to two terabytes worth of video footage. I have learned an incredible amount about DAM development and implementation in the last two years from our Production project, and much of that knowledge applies to DAM workflow planning in all aspects of business.

No matter what data, department or personalities have been involved, there is one resounding lesson from all of my experience with DAMs, BAMs, MAMs and TBDAMs: The development process is easy to get lost in once you start, even if you have a good plan going in. My articles will attempt to share lessons learned to help you ask yourself and your organization important questions about how, when and whether to proceed.

Do you have questions or observations you would like to share about your (current or potential) DAM development? Use the comments section below or email your question to ckingDAM(at)hotmail.com and I will address those questions here in coming blog articles.