Evolution of Processes and Practices

Many of us become so “heads down” getting things done, we easily lose sight of the big picture—namely “Why are we doing this? What the larger purpose does it served? What fundamentals, if anything, have changed?”

Three big changes have occurred in Digital Asset Management—with implications that we have largely not noticed:

Acceleration the IT innovation curve, increasing the productivity of digital technology
Skyrocketing consumer demand for more, higher production-value, and customizable digital content
Decreasing ratios of media producers to content projects (thus, a growing demand for greater productivity, speed, and quality)

Let’s take the acceleration of technology innovation. It boils down to this: almost everything digital will become 10 times faster and/or cheaper in five years and 100 times faster/cheaper in 10 years.

Of the many conclusions we might draw from this, the following might startle, annoy, or thrill you (depending upon which side of the innovation curve you sit):
Five years ago, we made many IT investments in DAM, storage, and networks that made a lot of good, practical sense.
Over the last five years, most of these IT investments did not become 10 cheaper or faster.
In fact, total cost of service for provisioning DAM per user INCREASED by as much as 15 percent year, depending on which software package you bought, how much you customized it, and how often you paid for a newer version.
Sure, we upgraded many of these DAM systems with newer versions of software that ran much faster new servers and storage systems.
However, many of our core assumptions of value and performance did not change: the total cost of service did not decrease along with lower overall industry costs of storage, servers, networking equipment, and bandwidth.
As a result, the overall potential performance of DAM system continues to come up short, failing to capture or exploit much of the industry’s innovations

A proven way to improve the value and performance of your DAM systems starts with adding more “soft value” to your firm, expanding your DAM-enabled workflows and rich-media services to a wider group of users as well as augmenting your DAM with new, higher value-added services.

Thus, you milk more out of your existing DAM investments, using what you have already but have not yet understood or gotten around to exploiting.

Where do you start?

Process Maturity Models for DAM

Process maturity models for DAM extend the basic concepts of the Capability Maturity Model and Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), distinguishing five key evolving process-capabilities of digital asset management:

Management Maturities: the five basic levels of managing a technical system (embedded pop up)
Metadata and Taxonomy Maturity Model: the six basic types of digital asset collections (embedded pop up)
Common DAM Configurations: the six basic DAM system configurations (embedded pop up)
Operational Marketing Maturity Model: the five common levels of process integration (embedded pop up)

We suggest that you use these four Process Maturity Models to understand your firm’s current-state capability of DAM, identifying likely next-step capabilities to build, buy, rent, or put on next year’s Christmas list.