The next wave in information management has arrived. It`s called digital asset management, says Julian Field, country manager at Ascential Software South Africa.
Most organisations have vast pools of unstructured information that they have not begun to access. This is where the emerging discipline of digital asset management has a vital role to play.
Digital asset management involves taking all of an organisation`s knowledge and information assets and structuring them so they can be managed efficiently through an electronic system, which is often accessed through the Web.
These assets range from photographs, video clips, electronic databases and Web pages, right through to paper-based documents, microfiche, and the knowledge held in employees` heads. Putting all of these in a central repository, indexing them, and providing employees with search capabilities can provide organisations with a real competitive-edge which comes from better access to information.
A handful of companies around the world have recognised the power of digital asset management, particularly those in the media and content businesses. The General Motors Media Archives Group, for example, started using the technology in 1999 to use archive material more effectively across multiple media, such as the Web, print and television. GM digitised part of its archive around eight years ago, and wanted to provide direct access to its archives to advertising companies and marketing staff. It also wanted to allow video end users to be able to access video clips themselves over the Net, rather than having to turn to the librarians.
More recently, Sistema Brasileiro de Televisao (SBT), Brazil`s market leader in prime-time TV, announced that it is to invest $10 million in a media asset management solution to improve access, preservation and reuse of its entire broadcast recording archive. SBT expects the new media asset management platform to improve efficiency and reuse of media assets for its multiple production teams, allowing the broadcaster to record and index video and audio broadcast information for near-real-time reuse. However, it is not just companies or business units that focus on producing and managing content that stand to benefit from use of this technology.
Companies rely on all kinds of information, including financial reports, text documents, audio and video files, graphics, messages and transactions, to drive the decisions that make them grow and prosper.
The challenge for modern businesses is to pull together large amounts of information from many different sources, including mainframes, databases, and the Internet, enhance its value, and deliver it in a usable format to the people who need it. Collecting and analysing unrefined data creates valuable and reusable assets for better business decisions, increased revenues, lower costs, and higher productivity.
It gives employees and executives information at their fingertips so they can focus on innovation and customer service, and it helps people across the organisation to collaborate more effectively.
Many obstacles need to be dealt with before digital asset management becomes mainstream: bandwidth is one, but that is a problem that should be resolved over the next five years.
Another complex issue organisations need to come to grips with is that of copyright and royalties: it is not always easy to distinguish between information proprietary to the enterprise; that which is in the public domain; and that which belongs to another person or company. Companies also need to think carefully about how they will ensure that digital assets are tamper-proof and valid.
The biggest challenge in digital asset management, however, is a physical problem: capturing all of this information, be it through manually capture, scanning it in, or converting it from a legacy data format into a modern standard, and then cataloguing it for use across the organisation.
Some organisations have so much information in files, on video, on microfiche or on old mainframe tapes that it could take years to capture and catalogue it. Often organisations do not even know where to find all of these assets spread across the enterprise, rotting in basements, or locked up in the heads of their staff.
More than 80% of all information assets are still not captured in any structured format, or they are residing in an electronic system. Organisations that want to be competitive in the coming years need to start wading into this sea of information now.
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