Digital Asset Management Definition , Benefits and Importance
What is digital asset management?
Digital assets are files such as images, videos, photos, documents and other media.
In our current business environment, the demand for more media and more information is growing exponentially and that means businesses need a system that can handle all their digital assets, preferably within one simple-to-use location.
What is involved in digital asset management?
Digital asset management (DAM) is business process management that provides organizations with a centralized online hub to create, manage, share, track and find digital assets.
A DAM streamlines management of all files including Microsoft Office documents, video, audio, design files, and presentations. Seamless integration of your DAM with your other systems ensures your DAM is not an island – but rather, it’s the single source of cohesion for your marketing stack.
With a DAM, your marketing team, designers, agency partners and other business stakeholders have uninterrupted access to your creative files. And at the same time, you have clear processes for your creative content.
The core of any Digital Asset Management system is the ability to easily search for your digital files according to metadata you assign by tagging with keywords and other descriptors. However this is just the start of how a DAM can make your life easy. Here are some DAM use cases:
• Online brandhub
• Local area marketing
• Creative approvals
• Manage creative jobs online
• Order branded materials
What is the importance of digital asset management for your business?
DAM can also refer to the software and systems that help perform the process. The software establishes a systematic approach to organizing and retrieving the assets.
The process of digital asset management begins with creating the digital content in a digital format or by encoding it digitally through processes like image or text scanning or digital audio recording.
Importance of DAM:
- Productivity. Searching for files — or the right versions of files — can consume hours of an employee’s time.
- Process efficiency. As with AI-embedded DAM, digital assets are not isolated — they are part of business workflows. Professionals can more easily locate the assets they need.
- Storage efficiency. As centralized repositories, DAMs can take advantage of cost and space-efficient storage techniques.
- Protection of rights and permissions. By applying rules and governance as part of the system, DAMs can act as keepers and guardians of valuable digital assets.
- Compliance. The ability to organize and rapidly retrieve these materials can save organizations time and effort, as well as mitigate the disruption of core Business processes.
What are the pros and cons of digital asset management?
If a digital asset management system is meant, in general terms, to “catalogue” an organisations valuable digital assets, why is the issue of risk very seldom addressed, especially in regard to cloud-based systems?
A problem I see with the cloud is that those very same valuable and precious assets are handed over freely to a third party, where the owners of those assets have little to no other control over what happens to them, apart from the promises of the service providers they hand them over to, that they will not allow anything untoward to happen to them, or their value to be in any way compromised.
Further to this, if the third-party DAMS are managed under the exclusive rules of the service provider and not the owners, things like customisation and even batch retrievals or migration become exorbitantly costly and complex issue at best, or impossible at worst. To add insult to injury, cost is dictated completely by the service providers. Why would anyone want to allow themselves to be held to ransom like that?
Isn’t it a bit like handing over the family jewels to a stranger for safe keeping? Where is the wisdom in that?
These things would count as substantial cons in my books.
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