A company’s assets are valuable, and often irreplaceable. Harper Collins, a leading English language book publisher, shares just how valuable a digital asset can be. “I remember sitting at one executive meeting and debating what an asset was,” recalls Rick Schwartz, CIO, Harper Collins. “It was around Thanksgiving and I said, well look, if you had the Emeril Lagasse recipe for cornbread and he was on Good Morning America saying, ‘I have the best recipe in the world and you can go to Harpercollins.com and download it for one dollar!’ If two million people downloaded the recipe for one dollar, would two million dollars for one recipe be considered an asset? And everybody went, ‘well yeah.’”

For eight years, Schwartz has advised Harper Collins’ executives on the importance, value, and potential of their digital assets. Implementing a digital asset management (DAM) system was initially a tough sell. Schwartz needed to convince his peers that assets extended beyond a book as one single unit. The content within the book can also be disaggregated as additional assets, potentially transforming a $24.95 hardcover recipe book into 150 separate, downloadable one dollar recipes. The organization, accessibility, and security of these files are imperative to success and profitability.

The ability to easily find content and produce a publication as efficiently as possible is essential in today’s competitive market. “An effective DAM system automates as much as possible, allowing the user to extract available metadata from input sources, easily identify assets, and preview all asset classes,” says Scott Seebas, CEO, Xinet. “In addition, an efficient asset management system integrates into production, making it easy track an asset’s usage over time.”

“Organizations have difficulty getting a handle on DAM due to the wide range of cases and functionality addressed by DAM vendors,” states Market Overview: Digital Asset Management, a Forrester Research report by Stephen Powers with Kyle McNabb, Shelby Catino, and Diana Levitt. DAM vendors focus on different capabilities such as media production or online delivery. Forrester’s report explains that DAM systems have the capability to support many functions within an enterprise including digital asset and rich media support, search and repository capabilities; remote access; Web content management; and light editing and modification of assets.

The Growth of Rich Media
“Web 2.0 technologies raised the expectations of online consumers,” says David Mennie, senior product marketing manager, content management and archiving division, EMC Corporation. The Internet makes content creation accessible and affordable. New technologies drive the change process and amount of information produced and consumed. “A recent IDC white paper sponsored by EMC, The Expanding Digital Universe, forecasts that information created each year since 2007 now surpasses the available storage capacity,” says Mennie. “Imagine that in 1996 only 48 million people routinely used the Internet. By 2006, that number was 1.1 billion. By 2010, the Internet could welcome another 500 million users, all of them consuming, and many creating digital content,” he adds.

Robert Cugini, founder/president, AppArt agrees, but believes there is more to the next generation of content users and creators. “Today’s enterprise is a global organization, one that is distributed and to a certain extent—decentralized. A VP of marketing in Palo Alto, CA might be working with a designer in NY, a photographer in Buenos Aires, and a printer in Topeka,” he says.

Rich media is interactive Internet assets-, often paired with audio, video, or Flash animation. This type of media is import to organizations’ everyday business functions. Rich media files are large, complex, and not easily recreated. DAM systems structure these files and make them readily available for anyone in the organization to view and present the terms of rights and usage.

“Until recently, the costs typically associated with designing, creating, and editing rich media content were considered sufficiently greater than other types of assets—making the business case for investing in these assets more difficult to justify,” says George Grippo, VP, media asset management, North Plains. “However, innovative DAM systems introduced workflow efficiencies, centralized storage and access, and distribution capabilities, and now reuse or re-purpose existing assets to achieve maximum return on investment.”

Businesses have a variety of solutions to help manage paper and business processes. Sometimes integrated with content management systems or document management systems, DAM systems differ by specifically targeting content creators and studios. EMC Corporation says the primary purpose of DAM systems is to re-purpose high-resolution digital master source files and create a wide variety of outputs from stored files.

“Enterprises show renewed interest in DAM due to increased creation and use of digital assets across multiple channels, coupled with maturing enterprise content management (ECM) strategies,” says Forrester Research, Inc.’s 2008 report, Trends 2008: Digital Asset Management, by Stephen Powers with Kyle McNabb and Diana Levitt.

Implementation
Harper Collins chose North Plains’ TeleScope DAM system to manage its assets. “We implemented the first generation of North Plains Enterprise TeleScope. It was a 26-week process start to finish,” says Schwartz. Harper Collins migrated over 40,000 assets from an outdated system into TeleScope. “26 weeks was pretty aggressive,” Schwartz admits. The company set up two classes of DAM users, creators, and re-users, totaling approximately 800 employees. The creators-—typically skilled designed staff—are responsible for properly archiving for the rest of the organization. The re-user division—anyone that needs content—makes up approximately 90 percent of the total user base and accesses TeleScope via a Web client.

Since its initial journey into DAM, the company has come a long way. “We’re probably the preeminent leader in the digital space amongst publishers,” says Schwartz. The company digitized over 17,000 full books, which are available for viewing over the Internet. “Over the years the system has become foundational. We built our other enterprise offerings in the digital space off of it,” says Schwartz.

Topps, an international marketer of entertainment products, principally collectible trading cards, confections, sticker collections, and collectible strategy games implemented Xinet WebNative Suite to manage its player library of sports icon photography. The company, which was founded in 1938, switched all of its photography to digital in 2003 to alleviate the piles of images they received from staff photographers. “With the WebNative Suite we’re able to keep track of our assets and add metadata with them. Our workflow evolved with it,” says Greg Pedersen, LAN administrator, Topps.

Pedersen says the entire implementation process was seamless and took about three weeks. The company’s implementation strategy played out in stages until all 50 of the original graphic services departments were trained. “I was involved in the training and it was a cultural change from the way we were doing it here,” says Pedersen. “But we didn’t go at it entirely full-blast. I showed some key people in each group what needed to be done,” he adds.

After the initial implementation, there is always room for improvement. Annual updates are generally necessary to ensure system improvements are implemented with little or no disruption, which is often a daunting process. “Updating takes a week, and three months to plan migration because of the complexity of our files,” explains Harper Collins’ Schwartz. The company tries to update once every two years.

For Harper Collins, the next step is video and audio files, which will be used in viral marketing campaigns to promote books. The hope is to create a buzz around new releases with audio and video files similar to that of movie trailers.

Pedersen says next on the Topps’ priority list is implementing a solution that expands the capabilities of Xinet WebNative Suite further into the organization to develop its business processes and create a more efficient workflow.

Consider DAM
AppArt’s Cugini is excited to see how organizations leverage DAM to streamline operations in new ways. He notes that one company is integrating DAM with an on demand printing system that will enable them to completely overhaul their print production processes.

There is no escaping the next-generation of Internet-enriched content as it makes its way into each aspect of virtually every industry. The amount of data quadruples seemingly every second as privacy and data security issues remain top of mind. DAM is a recommended solution for organizations that need help sharing, storing, retrieving, and managing any type of digital asset—specifically rich media.