As industries continue to evolve and businesses are increasingly becoming technology dependant, many are reaching a critical threshold when it comes to controlling and managing their enormous amounts of data, or as it is becoming know, ‘digital asset’.

Technically speaking, a digital asset is any media turned into a binary source. Digital assets or files can include artwork, logos, photographs, emails, text documents, or multimedia files. ‘Digital asset management’ - often abbreviated to ‘DAM’ – refers to the process of storing, retrieving and distributing these digital assets.

The process of digital asset management itself is rapidly becoming a valuable tool for companies who have employed it, in terms of both productivity and company valuation. By systematically organising files in a centralised system, it allows for quick and efficient storage, retrieval and reuse of digital resource files.

There are however enormous costs involved in digital asset management, and one question that both small and large businesses need to ask themselves before undertaking the process, is whether they can expect any returns on what will effectively be a long-term investment. Although industry experts have cited positive returns on investment (ROI), they also acknowledge the main problem with digital asset management is that the costs are too high.

The costs
Senior analyst at Forrester Research, Robert Markham explains, ‘the costs are so high that a lot of companies have been reluctant to invest in this kind of technology’, he goes on to explain that as the technology is still in its early stages, the base price for a digital asset management project is about half a million dollars, and as a result, ‘only Global 2000 companies can afford it right now’ he says. Although costs are likely to reduce as the market continues to expand, and technology continues to develop.

Although the return of investment could take years to materialise, by storing, digitalising, archiving and making existing physical assets easily accessible, organisations can put that data to work for their businesses.

Experts suggest that if businesses view digital asset management as a long-term investment, then long-term returns further down the road will make the process seem worth it. As Amy Lipton, director of IBM’s Global Digital Media Business division maintains, ‘it’s about maximising revenue by repackaging and repurposing existing content, and developing new revenue streams.’

Lost files, lost time
According to recent research an average of $8,200 per person, per year is spent on file management activities at work, which include searching, verification, organisation, back up and security issues.

Statistics also show that creative professionals spend an average of 1 out of every 10 hours of their time on file management, and searches alone can account for at least a third of that time. Further, a creative individual on average looks for a media file of some sort at least 83 times a week, and fails to find it 35% of the time. Digital asset management solutions are said to drop that figure down to 5%, enabling companies to be more productive.

Digital asset management, not only saves time, but also it cuts costs. Savings are made from labour reduction, as employees are enabled to spend less time locating assets and are able to spend more time elsewhere, on other projects for example. Another key benefit is having the ability to find and research existing work, which in turn facilitates the reuse of valuable creative assets from previous work. This could also lead to faster development, as having the ability to take advantage of previous projects could reduce turnaround time in future projects. As one expert concludes, ‘workflows and practices become systemised, allowing for increased productivity and more predictable business operations’.

The right customers
It is because of this increase in business productivity that the IT industry and companies such as IBM and Oracle in particular are targeting companies with vast amounts of data that need to be digitalised, archived and managed, in what is expected to grow into a multi-billion dollar market in the next few years. The digital asset management market is currently worth about $500 million dollars annually, and is expected to grow into the billions by 2007.

As more and more businesses in the United States are enlisting companies to help digitalise and archive their data, IT companies are increasingly working with non-profit organisations to store their enormous amounts of data. IBM recently announced the completion of a massive, three-year-long archiving project completed in collaboration with the Egyptian government. The project chronicles more than 5,000 years of biographies, locations, artefacts, and events in Egyptian history. Surfers of the Internet are now able to tour a reconstruction of Tutankhamun’s tomb, and browse thousands of other artefacts.

Low cost marketing
More and more cultural organisations, are putting together interactive and multimedia content online to reach more people and to make it more accessible. Although these organisations are not out to make a profit, what they are trying to achieve is still very important, and businesses should take note. By digitally archiving their assets, and used in conjunction with high-resolution, interactive, multimedia web pages, businesses are able to get an extremely low-cost form of marketing, which in turn could mean much greater revenues.

There do seem to be clear benefits in making information accessible to everyone all over the world. The Egyptian history project could lead to an increase in tourism for Egypt or further development through educating others about its culture. Experts hope that by drawing attention to examples of non-profit organisations, who indirectly obtain more revenue using digital archiving systems, then businesses whose primary concern is to increase their own revenue will be sure to take notice.

What is out there?
In a recent article published in Red Herring, Business and Technology journal, there was an assertion that not only is digital asset management a costly procedure, but also that ‘a single, marketable product has yet to be created.’ However, a simple search on the Internet throws up hundreds of companies offering their services as digital asset managers. One such company – Picdar Digital Asset Management Solutions - has specialised in asset management since the mid eighties, and is now one of the ‘market leaders in multimedia asset management and image library systems.’

Picdar ensure that their systems can be used by both large and small businesses in a broad range of industries, from retailers and charities to police forces and picture and news agencies. Their product range includes a hosted service, which will appeal to those who want secure and accessible digital asset management, but ‘prefer not to locate the software, hardware and expertise themselves’ but the company also offers a range of software – ‘a single product’ – that will allow anyone to digitally manage their assets.

Extensis Products Group is another provider of the type of product that are available on the digital asset management market. Extensis offers a range of software that is aimed at creative individuals, workgroups and enterprises that want to manage their digital content. Amongst their software is Portfolio, said to ‘intelligently adapt to the unique needs of your business so you can share, distribute your valuable digital assets to team members, partners and customer around the world.’ Portfolio enables you to catalogue any file format, preview files, build slideshows from Portfolio catalogues, it allows you to quickly locate any file as well as enabling you to customise catalogues to view them differently, it also claims to boost efficiency by offloading catalogue and image processing to the server.

There are products that allow you to manage and host your own digital assets, but as they are expensive and difficult to implement, some companies may find that they do not have the IT professionals necessary to support it on their own. As the market is expected to grow and grow, IT companies are hoping that they will be able to take the existing digital storage data to the next level. Right now digital asset management companies are promoting a hosted service, which has the added benefit of making companies feel more secure in their investment.