Magan Arthur: Intro to My Blog

What readers can expect from my blog is unbiased evaluation of trends and technology with real life stories of large scale DAM projects. I work with various vendors in the area of digital media creation, manipulation, management and distribution. While I have personal opinions about the technologies, architectures, and even people behind the products, I follow a simple principle: Every project is unique and the right application or technology is determined only through unbiased analysis and “down-to-earth” approach.

At a minimum that approach has to consider the people, the processes, the budgets, and the business reality in addition to the technology. In this first post I will take a look at Enterprise DAM system integration and the challenge of connecting  multiple existing DAM based workflows and systems into a coherent enterprise DAM architecture.

I have been around DAM for about 10 years now. I started as a project manager for what were then breakthrough projects of online asset management at Getty, Boeing as well as other Fortune 1000 companies. I have also worked with universities in the US and Europe on remote learning, archive, and research related applications. In my current role as senior principal for media and entertainment at Infosys I advice companies about achieving the vision I call the Digital Media Enterprise. My experience has been published in from of a book:

Expanding a Digital Content Management System for the Growing Digital Media Enterprise

Over the last years my focus has been on both the technical as well as the operational side of larger DAM implementations. Therefore I would like to start with a topic frequently encountered in these projects. When defining larger DAM projects I have noticed that the project stake holders are usually not fully aware of the difference between DAM as a core to exploitation and monetization of content, DAM as a driver of internal workflows and content distribution, and DAM as a digital archive of reusable assets.

All three areas are important to media as well as marketing companies and together they form what is often called an end-to-end digital supply chain. However, each of the segments has it unique challenges and in most cases it will make sense to implement each segment as a separate project or project phase.

First of all it should be understood that in almost all cases an end-to-end digital supply chain will include not one but many technologies and applications. The following is a list of the technology elements that are most relevant. This is not a complete list but more of a top 10.

1. Core rich media management  (DAM)
2. Core text or document management
3. Rights management (IPM or Intellectual Property Management)
4. Rights enforcement (DRM or Digital Rights Management)
5. Advanced search engine (“did you mean …”, relevance rankings, suggestions etc.)
6. Identity management (incl. single sign on)
7. Workflow management (including event monitoring and notification)
8. End user (or consumer) as well as administrative interfaces and/or portals
9. eCommerce engine
10. Interfaces to the business back-end systems (ERP, CRM, etc.)

In regards to point 1 and 2 I have been often asked to explain the difference between document management, web content management and digital asset management. This topic could fill an entire blog post. In fact it has and if this is a question on your mind you may like to read this article at CMS Watch Intro to Digital Asset Management: Just what is a DAM? 

Over the next few months I plan to post entries to this blog that will highlight specific issues and solutions for the larger end-to-end digital supply chain.  For today I would like to leave you with the definitions of the three big areas:

1) DAM as a digital archive of reusable assets.
If an organization has not yet developed sophisticated solutions to manage digital files and its related metadata then this will be the first step in developing any larger digital strategy. Digital archives today have the capabilities to not only store the files in file systems but to manage a large number of associated data and many more important functions and features. I will detail what I mean with sophisticated requirements for DAM as a digital archive in my next posts.  Here a small list of core aspects:

Metadata and taxonomy development is the core competency of several of my Expert Experience colleagues and Seth Early's blog should give you many good pointers in this area. It should suffice here to say that an application that builds the foundation of the digital strategy has to be very flexible and extensible in the area of metadata and taxonomy.

When DAM is used for archiving of a large number of potentially large files another important aspect is the integration of that application with storage management software. Hierarchical Storage Management or HSM is the key word here. Storing many tera bytes or even penta bytes of data can be costly. In many cases building a storage infrastructure that moves lesser used assets to cheaper storage devices is a long term TOC (Total Cost of Ownership) must have.

Other core functionality of a DAM archive should be the capabilities to transform or transcode the archived files into the formats required by those users or application that eventually will reuse the core assets.

Because the archive will often provide both data and files to other applications for further processing or distribution the integration options with these applications are very important and Web Service APIs as well as flexible XML export models are a must.

In addition to these technology areas specific to DAM archives there are best practices and operational aspects that are important for successful implementation and operation of larger digital archives. Most important is the fact that an organization will need to establish a team that owns and runs this aspect of the business. It should not be "owned" by IT. A librarian with computer skills (Also called cybrarian) and ideally a technically strong application administrator are the minimum FTEs required. 

Digitization and data entry of large analog archives can take many years of effort. Outsourcing that work can be an option but the digital archive may well have to be integrated with the analog library of today. Building "one stop shop" interfaces that allow internal and/or external clients to search both analog and digital archives can most likely be created at lower cost than that of "digitizing everything" approaches.

2) DAM as a driver of internal workflows and content distribution.
DAM as a driver of workflow and distribution has some very different requirements than the large archive. More blog posts will detail these areas but the highlights below:

Workflows as we all know are the integral part of any business process. In that they are usually unique not only to every business but to every team or group in a company. A flexible workflow engine that allows mapping these workflows is therefore important. Most DAM systems have very limited workflow capabilities but they do allow integrating with workflow engines that in turn can utilize the inherent functions of the DAM system like transcoding engines or security management.

Simpler workflows can be managed in some cases with metadata driven workflows. Users of the better DAM systems can have "inboxes" or "collaboration areas". While these features can handle only simpler workflows it is a real alternative to the quite expensive enterprise workflow engines.

In the area of workflow also the integration of the content creator's set of application will make a big difference. Can a creative person check assets in and out of the DAM without leaving his favorite image or video editing software?

When it comes to content distribution we touch on various features and other applications that need to be part of the full solution. The core requirement for the DAM that drives this distribution in the back end is INTEGRATION ABILITY. How good is the set of APIs? How well have the DAM application designers thought through the special requirements of internal end users, content distribution to partners, syndication clients and consumers. Key words are identity management and Single sign on. Advanced search functions will often help users find what they need.


3) DAM as a core to exploitation and monetization of content
In the area of asset monetization we touch on even more applications that need to be part of the full solution. There are portals, eCommerce, ad insertion, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), and specialized web services such as catalog services, order services and more. In some cases we need to protect the content with DRM and often we need to manage our rights. Those rights we have to the content and those rights we grant to our clients or consumers. Finally the transactions of the distribution portals may have to be fed into ERP systems for AR and AP as well as for royalty management.

The core requirement for the DAM again is INTEGRATION ABILITY. How good is the set of APIs? How well have the DAM application designers thought through the special requirements of eCommerce and rights and royalty management.

Comments

[John Gonzalez]

Hey there! Great blog and great approach! The first entry is a bit long... I suggest that you shoot for 34 paragraphs per entry. Perhaps take on each of the 10 technology areas you mention as one-per-entry??

Anyway, a great vehicle and a great approach. Good luck with it!
-jcg

[sudhir]

Hey Magan

This is really good. As JCG mentioned it will be of great help if each of these technology areas are seperately posted.

What are your suggestions for the organizations which do not have many digital assets, but can be benefited by transforming the existing assets to digital? What is the approach for them?

Regards
sudhir