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.
2008/01/01
Digital Asset Management Goes Enterprisewide
Enterprise Content Management
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the category of software that helps you manage all of the unstructured information - or content - in your enterprise. This information exists in many digital forms: text documents, engineering drawings, XML, still images, audio and video files, and many other file types and formats. Enterprise Content Management helps you create content with common desktop applications and easy-to-use content authoring templates. It can also capture and incorporate existing content from a variety of sources. Enterprise Content Management manages this content and the content from other enterprise applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and enterprise portals. It adds intelligence by creating categorization schema, metadata, and tags that make search and retrieval faster and more efficient. Enterprise Content Management also manages the review, revision, and approval process for any piece of content according to user-defined business rules - often termed Business Process Management (BPM). It has inherent workflow and lifecycle management capabilities to help achieve this.
