Turning digital asset management into a crucial competitive advantage is the goal of business leaders convening this week in New York at the Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management Symposium.

The conference begins Monday morning at the New York Hilton and features over 100 industry leaders, who will share best practices and lessons learned with those who are new to the field as well as more experienced hands.

Experts agree that the field is reaching critical mass. "It's unusual to find any significant publishing operation or brand management operation that doesn't at least have a tactical [digital] asset management solution," said Kieron Osmotherly, managing director of the conference. "We're seeing the evolution from tactical applications toward more strategically embedded applications."

Spending on digital asset management is expected to explode in the next few years, growing at a rate of 42 percent annually through 2008, according to a recent study by analyst firm IDC.

One of the driving factors behind that growth is the value generated by accelerating time to market. "It's taking processes from nine weeks down to nine days, nine days down to nine hours," said Osmotherly, pointing out how faster turnaround times can yield greater overall revenues and productivity.

Also, companies are seeing considerable cost savings as a result of using digital asset management effectively to improve the process of selling content online, reducing time to market and improving their ability to collaborate with customers, partners and affiliates.

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The broadcasting business was the first sector to take advantage of digital asset management systems, and the publishing business wasn't far behind, but now nearly every large organization with a sizable collection of digital assets is getting onboard.

Now that many organizations have several years of experience with digital asset management systems, end users' emphasis is shifting from tactical concerns, i.e. "How do I find the asset I need?" to more strategic concerns, i.e. "How do we create added value and new business opportunities with the assets we have?"

Executives who have been involved long enough describe the evolution as a profitable effort, but not without some bumps along the way.

Now that the majority of Fortune 500 businesses have put digital asset management systems in place, and smaller businesses are following suit, additional growth is expected to come from the government sector, whose massive stores of archived data are still difficult to search and use due to the lack of up-to-date management systems. The not-for-profit sector is expected to show important growth as well.

This week's conference is split into two tracks, one for new adopters of digital asset management systems who need help making the essential business case and managing initial deployment, as well as another track for those whose systems are well established and now want to take a more strategic view.

"We're very focused on practical end-user stories," said Osmotherly. "People are saying, 'This is how it added value to our business; this is the practicality of deploying these systems and making these projects successful.'"

This week's New York conference, the ninth annual conference on the topic, is expected to attract over 1,000 attendees from the worlds of online media, publishing and broadcasting.

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