The landscape
Well firstly let’s not assume you already know. The path to true Digital Asset Management (DAM) knowledge, as with most technical subjects, is paved with acronyms. Digital asset management refers to the act of storing, cataloguing, annotating, retrieving and distributing digital assets and the tasks, processes and administration that surrounds it. In simpler terms that means save, backing up and making a digital file easily accessible. A “digital asset” could be anything you can store digitally but commonly refers to image, audio, video or document files.
Because of the broad types of assets that can be managed digital asset management systems are categorised by their intended use; such as brand asset management systems, library asset management systems or production asset management systems. For digital asset management systems used to manage images these are commonly referred to as image management systems.
Return on investment
As with most sensible purchases other than to satisfy our basic needs they will serve two purposes. 1: make life easier; 2: save money. Investment in a digital asset management system will do both. Anything that will reduce the time your employees spend doing something will increase productivity and therefore reduce costs/increase turnover. A digital management system will do this in two ways:- Reduce time spent searching – As you would expect with any system that’s core purpose is organisation, it will save you time trying to find things.
- Reduce duplication – will stop two people producing the same asset. The problem most prevalent in large organisations is lack of cross department communication.
