A superior DAM solution allows for the ability for non-technical personnel to manage and deploy the full spectrum of digital media content through any channel, from the Web to print to point-of-purchase. Business users’ work only with “master” digital assets, without having to worry about specifications such as format, resolution, and size; automated transformation ensures that each asset is delivered in the correct form for each use.

DAM is an essential component of your digital web ecosystem. What should you be doing today to plan? Automate, Automate, Automate. With the ever increasing flood of rich media picking up pace – now is the time to put the processes in place to manage this volume of content that is sure to increase over the coming years.

There are two basic steps: “Measure twice and cut once” – plan for the ingestion of these assets as well as the taxonomy to make them useful in your organization. “Do more with less”. By designing an efficient work process to move the assets from the creation or digitization point into the repository while extracting important embedded metadata and adding other meaningful metadata, you can build the rock solid foundation of a self-service, rich media distribution engine and eliminate duplicated efforts, and error-prone manual processes.

If you haven’t yet implemented a DAM yet – don’t worry, you’re in good company. There are a lot of organizations that are just beginning to realize their need for a DAM and the harsh reality that they can’t continue to manage their growing collections on a network share. Cheer up! There is a lot of homework that you can do ahead of any technology implementation or selection to speed up the process. You can start planning by organizing your content, getting rid of duplicates, filtering out inferior content, establishing quality standards and file-naming conventions, and getting agreement on corporate and product metadata taxonomies. Think through the specific use cases for your rich media, what formats do you ultimately need the content delivered in? Who in your organization needs to have access to your newly organized repository? What do they need to be able to do with the content? Meanwhile, finding all of the rich media sources within your organization and mapping out your individual processes for acquiring, utilizing, modifying and distributing your rich media while simultaneously building a community of interested stakeholders will make your ultimate transition to the DAM world much easier.

Steam the torpedoes, full DAM ahead,

Michael