Digital Asset Management: The Heart of Any ECM Solution

8/14/2019 Digital Asset Management: The Heart of Any ECM Solution

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The Digital Push

It is now common for companies to generate huge amounts of digital content, both in

structured and non-structured formats in their daily operations. This content can be amyriad of different digital formats, including scanned images and documents, emails,web pages, various spreadsheets, presentations, text documents, audio and video files,and animation, to name a few. These data assets can also cross all functional areas ofan organization, such as marketing, product development, accounting, procurement,HR, corporate communications and so on. Many companies, particularly in the mediaand entertainment industry and in other content-intensive industries, such as healthcare,insurance, banking, finance, and telecommunications, have acknowledged the value of anall encompassing content managementsystem that can organize and manage allof their disparate and dispersed content.

Particularly in highly competitiveindustries, the ability to effectivelymanage content can help reduce overallcosts, effort, manpower, better leverageinformation, productivity, partnerships, client relationships, and can significantly add toan organization’s ability to compete. It is critical to the success of an organization to beable to make effective use of their information and digital assets.

ECM - The Sharing of Content to Build a Competitive Edge

Enterprise Content Management offers an organizational solution for tying togetherdivisional separations and creating a collaborative environment that enables themanagement and sharing of assets, knowledge and innovation across an organizationas well as communication with a company’s key constituencies. An ECM solution canprovide a company with the ability to organize, store, reuse , and easily distribute its everincreasing amount of digital content, control and track the use of its digital assets, andemploy its functionality to build its competitive edge. It is the combination of thesolutions offered by the ECM product suite that creates the operational synergies andadded efficiencies larger than the sum of its parts that bring value to the consumer.

Over the past few years Enterprise Content Management has been used to describe afairly wide variety of solutions, which has caused significant confusion in the minds ofend-users and potential customers as to what exactly constitutes an ECM. DocumentManagement, File Management, Image Management, and Web Content Management areexamples of related markets in which vendors have been prone to identifying themselvesas full ECM vendors.

Digital Asset Management: The Heart of Any ECM Solution

“It is critical to the success o an

organization to be able to makeefective use o their inormationand digital assets.”



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Defining ECM

We define Enterprise Content Management as an enterprise-grade integrated platform

solution that enables the ingestion, archival, search, management, repurposing, sharingand cross-platform publishing of content in a seamless, collaborative, and secureenvironment which is easily integrated with third party systems within the contentworkflow, spanning the asset lifecycle from creation through delivery.

Several component parts of the ECM suite can and are further defined by theirindividual industries and markets, can function as stand-alone products and are oftensold as independent solutions, and include many discrete features that identify themwithin their own product segments. Complete ECM solution platforms are distinguishedfrom each of the component parts through the additional functionality they provide, to thesynergies created through their cross-divisional and cross-functional integration, and the

resulting workflow and operational efficiencies produced.

Digital Asset Management

Digital Asset Management (DAM) is arguably the most critical functional feature of acomplete ECM solution. Documents, files, images etcetera in digital formats areorganizational assets and often constitute an organization’s intellectual p roperty, brand,business process and communication repository. It is inconceivable for an enterprisetoday to manage all of these assets without employing an orderly, efficient andsystematic asset management system. It is therefore imperative for an ECM vendor to

provide a DAM solution.

Frost & Sullivan has analyzed the DAMmarket extensively for the past 10 years,defining DAM as a value chain of solutionsthat enable the indexing and management ofdigitized content. A true DAM consists of arobust and secure repository through whichusers submit, search and retrieve documents, records, presentations, spreadsheets,web pages, images, animation, CAD files, and audio and video files – virtually any digitalcontent – with consistent metadata, tagging and indexing systems, automated content

tracking, versioning and content archival, along with data security and management, anda fully integrated process workflow management feature. Each of these constituent parts isessential to both DAM and, consequently, to ECM.

The digital asset management (DAM) component is itself in a highly competitive and

diverse marketplace, with its own distinct industry challenges and market forecasts.

“Digital Asset Management (DAM) is arguably the most critical unctional eature o a complete ECM solution.”



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In 2007, global revenues for the DAM component alone reached approximately $400million, outside of any bundled ECM solution. Many ECM vendors also can and do sellthe component parts of their ECM suite as individual products, including their DAM

solutions. The DAM component and its many features are an integral part of a completeECM solution.

DAM Key Features

An additional key feature of DAM and consequently, ECM, is the ability to ingest filesand content in any variety of formats, store them as unformatted or XML files, and whensubsequently retrieved, rendering into any number of formats and applications. Also, ascompanies work to maintain legal and regulatory compliance regarding the retention ofand accessibility to critical company and personal records, the archival, role based

access, usage policy, version control, tracking of and auto-aging of documents commonlyfound in DAM components can severely reduce the likelihood of lost, misplaced, or im-proper usage of these files throughout an organization.

Additional common features of a DAM component, including user authentication, accesscontrol, and data security tools, are of further benefit in ECM as they boost the functionalabilities of the other complimentary components. The ability to track who did what towhich document at what time and for what purpose – all benefits of the DAM/ECM solu-tion – can reduce headaches associated with lost work and effort, tracking the distribu-tion of and any updates made to widely disbursed content, as well as he lping controlunauthorized employee snooping, misuse of and misappropriation of company property.

Furthermore, the native collaboration and workflow tools of a DAM component are notablyextended to great functional benefit when applied across the additional ECM componentapplications. The asset life cycle, from ingestion to retrieval from the DAM repository, tore-rendering and reformatting, assignments, approvals, and monitoring through the work-flow tools, to the WCM tools, and finally through to being pushed out to the end users, ismade simpler through the use of the consistent metatagging, elimination of redundancies,automated versioning, and organizational control over the content, which is ultimatelyachieved through the DAM component.

Learn more at www.frost.com.
