By narrowing the focus, the company gets the project off the ground in 26 weeks with immediate benefits.The publishing industry was a bit of a latecomer to digital asset management, but in some cases that delay helped avoid expensive mistakes.
In a presentation at the recent Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management Symposium in New York, Rick Schwartz, CIO of HarperCollins Publishers, recalled the experience of leading his company's first DAM implementation.
Schwartz joined HarperCollins after managing previous initiatives at Sony Music and Young & Rubicam. "Cheap and cheerful" was his description of the publishing business, which tends to follow trends in technology rather than lead them.
"Our organization could only think in terms of a book. The book was the asset. They could not understand the jacket, the inside flap, the back cover, the spine, all the photographs … as a result, making the business case was even more challenging."
Click here to read about what can happen when librarians and creative professionals collaborate on a DAM project.
One potential trap for any IT executive, especially in early 2000, was the irrational exuberance of many executives regarding asset management projects considering the relative immaturity of the DAM applications that were available.
"At that point in time, a number of our competitors within the publishing industry were taking on extremely large digital asset management projects … predicated on the promise that the Internet and intellectual property were going to be the nirvana of every organization, delivering revenue in shopping bags full of money for the organization," Schwartz said.
"As a result early adopters were working on that promise of a business case and moved to expensive, extensive projects that were excessive in scope, [involving] huge investments."
Schwartz's situation was further complicated by the tough-as-nails business climate he faced at HarperCollins, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.
"My boss is tough … [he] will not do anything unless there's an ROI attached to it. So we had to come up with a business case that was based on cost savings deliverable to the organization and not industry promise."
Murdoch's other business goals also added pressure. "At that point in time News Corp. was hoarding cash to buy DirecTV. So if I couldn't demonstrate a 12-month ROI, I didn't have a project. It was that simple. So we kept the scope extremely narrow and extremely focused on the cost drivers."
Click here to read about the difficulty of identifying parameters for a DAM implementation.
Schwartz's team embarked on a crash implementation program, completing installation within 26 weeks and immediately seeing important benefits. Much of the direct cost saving resulted from reducing time wasted searching for assets, as well as by not having to pay outside service bureaus to burn and deliver copies of HarperCollins' own assets. The project paid for itself in a year.
At this point, Schwartz feels that DAM has hit its stride and will deliver important benefits through the foreseeable future.
"Strategy is now coming back into play," he said. "My competitors, who bet on the Internet as being justification for moving forward with DAM, were wrong. The market was not ready.
"At this point in time, we are now seeing it come back into mainstream. Within our own organization we are creating and repurposing assets for cellular phones. The new generation of cellular phones will allow audio books to be played on them, so the IP that we are now storing within those systems needs to be able to address that."
As an example, he cited the asset management features included in Adobe Systems Inc.'s new Creative Suite as well as Adobe's Bridge technology.
"Those technologies are real and enable that fundamental shift to moving IP on a micro-based transaction into the marketplace, so from the early-adopter models to the future side of the equation, DAM is delivering and the potential for those new key components to actually drive revenue into the organization will happen."
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