This snip from KM Worlds article DAM: It’s Not Just For Disney Anymore. Cearly demonstrates the need for companies to look at the management of marketing assets across the whole business model. This includes ease of use, flexibility and speed to market. It’s about strategy now, the spreadsheet has become the media.

Best Practices Ahead
There are stages by which organizations can approach its entry into the DAM world. I wanted to know if there were any “best practices” for approaching DAM.”The biggest problem is that people don’t even have a central repository for digital assets… that’s the first step,” answers Michael Snow. “An insurance agent in the field may not have the ability, at 11 o’clock the night before a presentation, to go to a site where the latest, greatest and approved content is waiting for him to pull together a presentation. Just providing a central place where he could go for approved content is hurdling over the first major barrier,” says Michael.

“The secondary layer adds complexity,” he continues. “What if I need a low-res version of a video, and all we have are broadcast videos? What if there are 100 different slide presentations, and I need slides 1 and 2 from this presentation, and 4 and 5 from another? How do I do that, and know I am getting the approved content of those slides? There are folks out there, many of whom were the early adopters, who are well into their third, fourth or fifth phase. They’re looking at the future, and looking at both their internal and external constituencies’ needs for approved content.”

But even for the average “late adopter,” the drive to get control over rich media assets is making its impact. “A ton more customers are realizing, as Web 2.0 overtakes the world, that video is such an important medium that they HAVE to provide a way of managing it in an online environment,” states Michael. “It’s the flood of content that is causing our customers to say: ‘We need to find a way to get a hold of this NOW because it’s becoming way too cumbersome to manage it in the ways we have in the past. A fileshare is not significant enough anymore.”

Other outside forces have, like many areas in the KM world, driven the demand for technology solutions, sometimes in unexpected ways. I asked Mark Arbour for examples: “Training is a growing area. With all the attention on corporate governance, companies have to provide training, and they have to prove their employees take the training, and take the right version of the training. Also, a lot of life sciences companies use DAM to manage standard operating procedures, and the training associated with that. Training plays a big role in compliance, and DAM plays a big role in training,” Mark says.

DAM is certainly here to stay, and here to stay in organizations far afield from the entertainment and media companies of the past. This is an ongoing and extremely active segment of the marketplace that I, for one, look forward to watching.

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