Digital asset management

September 23, 2011 - 1:32 GMT

This was my first time at the Henry Stewart DAM conference, and it was an unexpected pleasure: Unexpected because I wasn’t originally slated to speak at the event at all, but was in fact pinch-hitting for Seth Earley. The pleasure was genuine, however. I found that the entire event had a cohesiveness that I rarely see at conferences of any size. With a single track of shorter-than-usual presentations and plenty of time for conversation, it seemed that all participants attended just about every event. Attendees were also generous with information, from confessions of pain points in their current business processes, to their known and possible solutions. I highly recommend this event.

Thematically, just about everyone was talking the challenges of using assets in multiple contexts and workflows. The keynote about integrating DAM with other technologies; the United Airlines rebranding case study that detailed perhaps the most significant enterprise-level challenges I’ve ever heard in my career; and conversations and demonstrations about ebooks, tablets, and social media all reflected the very real-world wrestling matches that we are experiencing today as media opportunities expand and our tools converge more closely around workflow. It was also clear that DAM needs are growing even more prominent than before, and no more so than during the Accidental Asset Manager panel.

What is possible with DAM today wasn’t even possible three years ago, or at least not without a lot of manual and hard-coded work. I expect DAM tools will continue evolve. Not only do I believe the integration with new tools and interfaces will grow stronger and more transparent, but DAM tools and best practices will exert their influence into other parts of the business. The industry has strong upward momentum, and I expect DAM work to become an even larger part of the conversation than it is now.

August 12, 2011 - 3:35 GMT

Earley & Associates recently announced a webinar series on Content in Context: Why Dynamic Content and Content Choreography is Critical to Information Management. Since you may be asking yourself, “what is content choreography?” we thought we’d share the history of the term and what we mean by it.

Back in March of 2011, a major global high tech company engaged Earley & Associates to work on the redesign of a major website, site search, metadata and all new web CMS and DAM infrastructure. It was an enormous undertaking, headed by Marketing and involving brand managers, the SEO team, content authors, creative agencies, a systems integrator, a user experience design agency, technical consultants, and the IT department. The existing sites were to migrate from traditional navigation, search and single page content to a totally new paradigm of dynamic content collections, where user context would be driven by the search experience more than by navigation or site depth. With personalization. And in multiple languages. Taxonomy and metadata would play an important role in each of these areas, but just how well the whole system was going to hang together (“If we do not hang together, we shall all hang separately...”) was a real concern, and the very reason we’d been called in as a sort of SWAT team.

June 15, 2011 - 11:02 GMT

I spent a couple of days recently at the Semantic Technology 2011 conference in San Francisco.  A number of different themes and implementations struck a chord with me – and I could overview these all together at length.  But for now I will focus on two particular implementations that showcase both success, for all of us to learn from, and themes/directions, for information management professionals to pay heed to.  These two themes, in my view of this conference, are: Ontology is the New Taxonomy and Managing Vocabulary to Build Semantics-Based Knowledge Experiences.

In this post I want to begin a discussion on the first--using semantic technology to build ontology-based websites--by telling the story of the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) World Cup Website.  Quite apart from it being a landmark achievement, there are also huge implications for those who build taxonomies – since taxonomies as we currently know them (“flat” hierarchies, faceted or not) are likely going to play a more minor role in the emerging semantic web world.  

This presentation by John O’Donovan (now at the Press Association, but then chief architect of BBC News and Sport Interactive) of the work at the BBC was the first that strongly resonated with me.

Briefly stated, The BBC's World Cup web site was almost certainly the biggest (at its time) pure-play implementation of semantic web technologies on a commercial media site.  Or … as one pundit put it …if there was a World Cup for the Semantic Web, then the BBC may have lifted the trophy for its country.”  There you go … Brit humor in action.  If you can’t excel at the sport …  then at least you can excel at something else.  I, being British, love it. :-)

November 02, 2010 - 9:15 GMT

In an earlier blog, I introduced the term eTaxonomy.   ETaxonomy represents “embedded taxonomies”.  Many kinds of IT solutions rely on taxonomy as a core organizing principle (reference data, content object models, information architecture, metadata schemas, etc)  as opposed to simply being a navigational construct.   In this blog, I discuss applications of eTaxonomy from our recent client work.  Of note are:

  • Search
  • Document and Records Management
  • Content Management
  • Digital Asset Management
  • Ecommerce
  • Marketing Campaign Management

Search                           

Search is about metadata.  A search application “derives” metadata by creating an index of the content.  The index is information about the content, i.e. metadata. The search tool uses the index to locate documents and pages.  This “derived metadata” can be enriched by adding attributes or keywords with terms defined in a taxonomy.  Taxonomy provides a hierarchical structure of controlled vocabulary terms.   With this structure, search-enabled applications can present related concepts, broaden or narrow the search, and filter results based on “facets” or attributes.  The use of related terms (developed with a “thesaurus” – taxonomy on steroids) provides tremendous power in search applications.

Document and Records Management

February 02, 2010 - 1:16 GMT

We all know that metadata can be a challenge, especially in Digital Asset Management (DAM) contexts, where metadata is the only thing making those assets searchable and reusable. To all those who work with data architecture, content management, search or taxonomies for Digital Asset Management, we'd love to hear from you...

Earley & Associates has put together an industry research survey on organizational maturity and its correlation with metadata and information development best practices.

What do you get in return? Take the survey now and receive free passes to the webinar where we will review survey results and an upcoming Taxonomy Community of Practice webinar (a $100 value).

On a roll and want to yell from the rooftops about your frustrations? Take this short poll from CMSWire on your biggest DAM challenge.

January 15, 2010 - 3:44 GMT

Our second session of the Digital Asset Management (DAM) Jumpstart series will address creative workflows and marketing resource management. The following post from speaker Ralph Windsor of Daydream describes the problems organizations face without effective metadata strategies in place to manage marketing communications:

After a decision has been made to invest into DAM or MRM solutions and the system has been introduced, one of the realisations that many marketers run into is that old IS maxim, “Garbage In Garbage Out”.

First, staff begin amassing marcomms collateral with the intention of uploading it. Then there is the next job to consider: who will carry out the cataloguing work so we can all find it? At this point, enthusiasm amongst most creative and marketing personnel begins to wane and so also their motivation to complete the cataloguing work effectively.

To get through the ever growing mountain of collateral produced by the business, metadata entry and management tasks may be passed down to inexperienced juniors or carried out at high speed to ensure that assets are available on the system - where everyone just assumes their colleagues will be able to find them because they are 'on the system'.

January 11, 2010 - 12:30 GMT
Our first session of the Digital Asset Management (DAM) Jumpstart series introduces best practices for gaining organizational support for DAM programs through sound business case development and ROI models. One of the featured speakers, Joel Warwick of JAW Consulting, shares his thoughts on the importance of effectively presenting the DAM business case:

With the benefit of hindsight though many DAM projects, and even more business cases, the most profound lesson I’ve learned is akin to ‘money can’t buy you love’. The business case must be more than just a tool to fund your project. There’s both the ROI aspect and strategic rationale.

The gains firms realize from DAM derive from fundamental changes to business processes, in an environment of complex, highly variable workflows. While DAM systems enable these improved processes, the organizational support required to make these transitions is the crucial factor in how quickly the gains from DAM are realized. Yep, we have to figure out exactly how those users should use the system, then make sure they do it.

The presentation of the business case if often the best opportunity to secure this level of support from the right people. Teams often narrowly focus on ROI achieved through cost savings, to narrowly focus on securing funding for the DAM system implementation. The big gains, and typically what’s really behind a firm’s interest in DAM, are strategic and eventually drive increased revenues. Cogent, visually-depicted business cases often become the master from which project “marketing” is derived – whether securing funding for system implementation projects, fostering executive sponsorship support or marshalling the numerous resources that make the transition to new, improved business processes actually come true.

December 07, 2009 - 8:05 GMT

Card sorting is a popular technique for getting at users' understanding of content structure, relationships and terminology. I often will break out a card sorting exercise early on in a taxonomy project using terms extracted from the client's content or pre-existing taxonomies to get a sense of what kind of organizing principles are important to the users. I also find it to be a great way of socializing the project and educating people in taxonomy and information architecture.

Recently, I've been doing a lot of digital asset management (DAM) projects, where our taxonomy is meant to help organize and give access to a collection of images or other visual assets, usually through faceted search. While the typical card sorting activity is still relevant, given that we'll be using words/labels to create the taxonomy for the assets, I've found it to lack a certain something in this context.

So during my current project with a global pharmaceutical company, I decided to try a different approach: a visual card sort.

The same rules apply here as they do with traditional card sorting: you can do an open card sort (no pre-defined categories given), or a closed card sort (established set of primary categories). The only real difference being you do it with pictures, not words. And it tends to be a bit easier and fun, as many people are inherently visual.

September 21, 2009 - 4:08 GMT

“Having the people,systems and governance in place to facilitate a cross channel view of marketing assets and customer experience is a critical challenge many organizations are facing”

Laura Keller, Strategist at MISI company 

Silos Revisited

In many organizations the responsibility for creating marketing assets is decentralized and siloed by channel. One group is working on email marketing, another on web commerce, others on social media and still other groups on more traditional print and broadcast. Without solid governance and systems to support a view across these channels, companies are missing a tremendous opportunity to: 

  1. Re-use marketing assets
  2. Realize value from cross channel synergies
  3. Evaluate the consistency and quality of marketing assets
July 07, 2009 - 1:33 GMT

Digital assets come in a seemingly limitless variety of flavors. Some intrinsic metadata comes along for the ride with particular formats, but without a robust metadata system and workflow in place, many assets will be “left behind” in any digital asset management (DAM) system. Use a systematic approach to naming: reduce the burden on users who need to open assets to determine contents, get those assets appearing in search results, and prevent misplaced files and data extinction down the road.

June 12, 2009 - 2:05 GMT

I just finished moderating the Digital Motion Picture Metadata Symposium at AMPAS.  The day covered all aspects of metadata from pre-production through production, post, distribution and archiving.

We had presenters from Pixar, Sony Pictures, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Marvel Studios,  Warner Brothers, CNRI, Gracenote and the Library of Congress.

We saw examples from productions including The Incredibles, Wall-e, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Syriana, Ocean's Eleven and others.

The day was packed with presentations that addressed all aspects of the metadata lifecycle for Digital Motion Pictures.

Digital Motion Picture Metadata Lifecycle

Digital Motion Picture Metadata Lifecycle AMPAS Symposium

Podcast and session summaries coming soon.

August 18, 2008 - 3:56 GMT

I worked on a project recently highlighting findability issues with unstructured content and the need for appropriate tagging using values from a controlled vocabulary.

At the heart of this project was Digital Asset Management (DAM), a rapidly growing area as more multimedia content is being distributed online, particularly for marketing purposes. The inherent problem with digital assets is the potentially large amount of information about what a piece of content is but the lack of information describing what that content is about. Unlike other content, which may contain text or be located with surrounding textual context, digital assets do not typically contain text, especially any which is structured for discovery by search engines. Any textual and searchable elements must be associated to digital assets through the use of metadata. Metadata describing what the content is, including attributes like video length, number of pixels, and file size, can be associated to the content and is often automatically attributed through business rules.

What the asset is about, however, is not inherent. It must be associated to the content either manually or automatically by loading the content once business rules have been thought out and established.