We all know that innovation is not a coincidence, but the result of a clear strategy; there is no innovation without strategy. Investing in a DAM system without a clear strategy could be an unfortunate waste of money, or an opportunity lost. This point about the importance of strategy intrigues me, because when business is going well ans you ask a manager about strategy for the future, you might get this answer: “Things are going well now – we don’t have to worry about the future. Thankfully, we have a hell of a lot of work to do now.” But if you ask the same question when business isn’t going well, the answer will most likely be: “We don’t have the time right now – we’ve got more important problems to deal with than thinking about strategy.” The result is unfortunate: a number of businesses are closing down, not because they run out of money, but because they lack a clear strategy.

I am suggesting that investing in a DAM ststem is a crucial, collegial, highly strategic decision for a company, with a profound impact on the whole organization. Investment in a DAM system does not belong to ICT because “it’s just another server in the server room.” It belongs to many different areas of the company – from general management to marketing and communication, from production to ICT – creating economic return only if there is a clear vision and a strategy identified to achieve that vision. I believe a DAM is the most flexible, modular, and expandable system a company could invest in to effectively strengthen its competitive margin on the global market and achieve its primary business objectives.

Two major factors make it necessary for today’s companies to invest in a Digital Asset Management system : one is the global crisis. Because of market contraction, companies have been forced to study and adobt new marketing, communication, and production processes to maximize efficiency, flexibility, and accessibility on a global scale. The second is social business: the Web 2.0 revolution has pushed companies to rethink how to build the multilingual content of their global marketing communication strategy, to distribute it globally and effortlessly across any existing channel or platform. Within this framework, DAM is the software solution that allows any kind of company (service, manufacturing, media publishing, financial, insurance, etc.) to build the most effective marketing and communication processes to create, manage, share, distribute and publish in real time any digital content of any kind of output channel.

In conclusion, today DAM has become the very heart of enterprise content management strategy, since -as Ann Rockley suggests in her book Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy – the digital content stored within it is “the lifeblood of any organization.”