Digital asset management is not software or a system, but how to do business

Abstract

Digital asset management (DAM) is still new to many businesses. Indeed, some companies have DAM systems and do not even know it, while others are using the web content management systems built to run their websites as their DAM tool. Digital content is currency. It is traded back and forth within departments, internally as well as globally in some organisations. The value a DAM system can provide is when that content can be used across the company, across departments and then across the globe. Marketing departments are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on digital photography, web content elements, code snippets, videos and applications. Once those assets are purchased, where do they go from there? Most likely it is somewhere on their personal drive, a cloud drive, USB or worse, with their vendor. The true value of a DAM is having that one source of truth. This paper focuses on how to shift a company's internal culture to one where DAM is a way of doing business, not just a piece of software.