Digital asset management. Definition

Digital asset management. Definition

Digital asset management (DAM) is a set of processes that when working together give a system, repository, and enabling workflow process for managing publishable media content such as images, illustrations, documents, audio, video and physical (non-digital) elements.

What is digital asset management?

Digital asset management is an IT-based practice for the systematic reuse and re-expression of pre-existing digital objects that, when successfully done, accelerates business processes and time to market deliverables. That's the formal definition. Read other Definition of Digital asset management.

Digital Asset Management Elements

Main elements of Digital Asset Management

• Viewing assets as digital content plus the associated metadata that makes it possible to be identified
• The ability to group individual assets to form packages or collections of assets
• The ability to ingest, index, catalogue, navigate, transform, re-purpose, and publish to a wide range of digital formats while protecting integrity of the original assets
• Enterprise capability and linkage to technical infrastructure, for example, network, storage, database
• Ability to administer and control the flow of assets into and from the system, as well as the groups and individuals who have access to assets

Digital Asset Management Systems Types

General categories of digital asset management systems

• Brand asset management systems, oriented on aid of content re-use in large organizations.
• Library asset management systems, oriented on storing and retrieving of large amounts of occasionally changing media assets, for example in photo or video archiving.
• Production asset management systems, oriented on storing, organizing and revising control of frequently changing digital assets, for example in digital media production.
• Digital supply chain services, pushing digital content out to digital retailers (e.g. games, videos and music).

Asset Management

Assets. Asset Management

Assets, in any commercial set up, include the monetary investments, plants, infrastructure and its human resources. Asset management is, consequently, a process that aims at the optimum utilization of resources for maximum returns at the minimum investment or costs.
An asset can be defined as something that is owned by a person or organization that has a cash value, including property, goods, savings, and investments. Hence, asset management refers to the management of the assets by money managing teams. While the major emphasis is on managing the investment portfolios of a company, asset management also contains management of physical assets such as equipment, money and property, and non-material assets such as information and the workflow processes.
Asset Management in general is related to the management of locations, physical objects or items of value and might include the following: financial instruments, furniture, computers, property, buildings, etc.

Digital Asset Management

Digital Asset Management (DAM) and derivative terms like Brand Asset Management or Channel Asset Management often specifically refer to digital assets that are usually media related, but it is not mandatory.