Digital Asset Management Toolkit

A new approach to IT Asset Management

Until this time, digital asset management software was developed to focus on a the following items:

• Keep track of what you own
• Know where it is
• Know how much it's costing you

This could limit its value to other parts of the business, such as operations and IT services, and could lead to silos and turf wars over which group owns what processes and data, and diminished returns. By combining the digital asset management repository with the CMDB, and further integrating the tools that IT uses to manage systems and implement change, asset management becomes something that everyone is participating in, whether they know it or not.

Information about Digital Asset Management that you'll use

Not only can you have metrics that will help you prioritize projects and demonstrate the business value of keeping IT in-house, IT staff will have the data they need to understand how a given device is currently configured, what it's related to, and perhaps whether or not it's under warranty. They can also act on this information using any of the other integrated management tools that Altiris provides to execute change in a managed, repeatable way.

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Digital Asset Management Goes Enterprisewide

Digital asset management (DAM), like many other technologies, had its origins as a point solution, targeted to the needs of media companies and marketing departments to effectively manage the images, video, audio and other digital material they created and used. Digital Asset Management technology has continued to evolve, and today it is being deployed not only in companies outside the media vertical, but also to user communities across multiple departments as part of companywide enterprise content management (ECM) strategies.

If the activity in the vendor community is any indication, this is a trend with staying power: Interwoven purchased MediaBin and Documentum acquired Bulldog, Adobe developed a media server designed to integrate with multiple enterprise content management systems, and both IBM and Stellent have developed internal Digital Asset Management tools while also allying with prominent third-party vendors. In the case studies that follow, we see how three prominent companies, Chrysler, Acuity and Reebok, are benefiting by taking an enterprisewide approach to Digital Asset Management.

DAM

DAM: Short for digital asset management, a system that creates a centralized repository for digital files that allows the content to be archived, searched and retrieved. The digital content is stored in databases called asset repositories while metadata such as photo captions, article key words, advertiser names, contact names, file names or low-resolution thumbnail images are stored in separate databases called media catalogs and point to the original items.
Digital asset management also is known as enterprise digital asset management, media asset management or digital asset warehousing.

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.

Enterprise Digital Asset Management. Part 2

Enterprise Digital Asset Management provides a common platform for digital content across the entire organization. Publishing venues and academic applications from web sites, through course management and e-portfolio, to the Library itself can take advantage of this infrastructure to serve the full and diverse array of constituencies in the community. The commonality of the infrastructure distributes the management of intellectual property to copyright holders themselves while securing the content in a manner that recognizes its importance to the future of a company. Advanced tools derive and synchronize highly detailed and multi-layered metadata. The management infrastructure facilitates fluidly building relationships between content elements at a finer and more granular level than ever imagined, leading to unlimited possibilities for developing new methods and new knowledge.
The most basic implementations of enterprise Digital Asset Management yield gains in efficiency – managing, storing, and using digital content. More advanced implementations boost productivity in the production and reuse of digital materials through digital media transcoding and analysis services. And, the most advanced Digital Asset Management infrastructure manages metadata and data relationships in highly granular and complex ways.
Enterprise Digital Asset Management will be the change agent leading to a competitive advantage for companies of the future.
Read the first part of Enterprise Digital Asset Management article.

Enterprise Digital Asset Management. Part1

Digital Asset Management (DAM) is as well a form of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) that is concerned with content stored using digital electronic technology.
Enterprise Digital Asset Management is a technical infrastructure for fine-grained control and management of digital materials across an organization. It supports the most commonly used data types in the form of documents, images, audio, and video, but can also include animation, three-dimensional modeling, and other large data sets. This infrastructure essentially distributes tools for controlling and managing these assets, empowers creators to control their use, and provides a common platform for an organization. In this way, an organization or a company can manage the collective intellectual property in a manner consistent with the vested value it represents.
Digital Asset Management can provide far more than basic control and management. Digital media services can facilitate the fluid use and exchange of digital materials. Conversion and transcoding services change any document, image, audio, or video file from its original format to whatever format best suits a particular use. Analysis services can peer into the content itself and extract text to be used as metadata for search and retrieval. Full text can easily be extracted from documents and advanced tools are utilized to derive metadata from media. These analyses include such features as voice-to-text, optical character recognition, facial recognition, sound recognition, and scene change detection. Digital media services applied at the enterprise level relieve individuals of the heavy lifting needed to work with digital materials, foster productivity.
A highly advanced approach to digital asset management will treat metadata itself as an asset.

Read the second part of Enterprise Digital Asset Management article.

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.