Creating a DAM plan with evident long-term business value requires focused goals, research and an awareness of how increased efficiency cuts costs.NEW YORK—The value of digital asset management is often a long-term proposition, and that value isn't always clear to the people who write the big checks to pay for it.
Skiff Wager, former CIO of the Scripps Networks (of The E. W. Scripps Co.), shared ways to make the business case for digital asset management in a speech at the recent Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management Symposium here. He emphasized the importance of a phased approach.
"I follow a pretty clean, straightforward model: Ingest, manage and distribute. Because when I back down into the business strategy and I say, 'Okay, what am I trying to solve?' … Well, it could be that you have a preservation problem. I've got tapes out there that are disintegrating. They're in file cabinets. They're all in boxes. They're in storage. What am I really doing with that?
"I'm ingesting content. I haven't done anything with it yet. I can't manage it yet, because I don't have it in a manageable format. So, you need to look at what you're trying to solve."
Having defined one's goals, he said, the next step is to decide which category of tool is best suited to those tasks.
"I think there are three things to define: DAM, MAM [Media access management] and content management. Media access management you'll normally find if you narrow the focus and determine what the terminology is. I find [MAM projects] in graphics departments, production departments, broadcast engineer departments that are just dealing with rich assets, right; video, audio, graphics, animation."
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Getting senior executives to sign on to a manageable range of tasks can be a struggle in itself, Wager said.
"When you get them in the room and ask them what their needs and their requirements are … you get a long list. Well, you can't have that many direct focuses. So, what you do is you try to narrow that focus down … everybody says they want to expand revenue opportunities, whether you're a Young & Rubicam, whether you're a Universal Studios, whether you're Scripps, whether you're a private communication and marketing company, right? We want to increase and expand our revenue," he said.
But regardless of top executives' desire to make asset management initiatives yield new revenue, Wager said, the first benefits usually appear as cost savings. "When you look at the financial spreadsheets, you'll find that most of the gain is in efficiency gains, which in turn drives extended revenue. How can we actually do better and justify our workflows? And a lot of the conversation talks about content accessibility. 'Where is it? How can I get to it?'"
Read more here about digital asset-management strategies discussed at the Henry Stewart DAM Symposium.
As is the case for any new software purchase, the business decision comes before the software choice, Wager said.
"Don't go technology first, because when you buy it and finally get everything done and you're a year down the road, new revs may have come out. Look at Anystreams: They just launched Agility 5.0. They do packaging now after they encode and transcode assets. Never had packaging before. Well, if I'd bought them a year ago, I might have bought a packaging solution as well."
Naturally, it pays to do your homework before jumping into a rollout, he added: "Risks, revenue and demand. And, of course, the implementation itself is always hairy. Do your business work up front. Remember, the attention is in the details."
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