While at NAB, I had two great conversations with a few folks who are still struggling to get their “top of the top” management in their organization to buy into why a centralized DAM is necessary. Well, this article is for my new friends! I must note that the value for unifying and managing ALL digital assets in an organization through the lifecycle is a strong business case. However, since we were chatting about video assets in particular, I will focus on helping them make the case for video.
The explosion of video in organizations and the resulting need to manage and distribute video assets is critical, and it is a significant challenge. With the cost of lost or misplaced work, the expense and risk of maintaining an archive (both physical or digital), corporate/brand compliance, and the increased time to market associated with assets, many organizations still struggle for solutions to better manage ALL of their video assets. Consider these two challenges, while there are many, many more factors, I believe these two are the most common.
CHALLENGE 1 – Everyone can create content for their department.
A big challenge in managing video assets typically start before the video content is even created. Many organizations are unaware of where and how their video content gets created. Various departments from production and marketing to human resources (among others) have started creating video in much greater frequency. Everyone has a mobile device or a camera that can shoot video, so why not capture the content? Since these departments all live in their own silo, and in most cases have their own individual budgets and approval processes for content creation, there is no centralized process to let other business users know how many video assets there are or if video is being duplicated across departments/geographic locations – adding significantly to the overall cost. Such siloed business environments and decentralized departmental assets create needless redundancy while also making video assets hard to create and manage.
CHALLENGE 2 – Lost work adds up.
The cost of lost or misplaced work has become a major headache for organizations, as the benefits of reusing and repurposing existing video assets is very clear. The cost itself for lost video content can be huge! It is also a resource-drain especially when assets need to be constantly repurposed. Large amounts of irreplaceable time as well as resources are wasted by organizations trying to find assets that have been carelessly misplaced in storage silos across departments. This is often seen in the form of video randomly on someone’s local computer or a shared server that has a folder structure that only the owner knows how to decode. Many times the missing content is never found when needed and it has to be recreated – adding yet further cost burden over the time and resources already eaten-up looking for the content. Such lost assets are rarely “found” which exposes the organization to an entire new set of challenges since the video content could have sensitive information that could be misused. (We won’t go down that challenge in this article.)
DAM to the Rescue…
A Digital Asset Management solution adds value to video content by creating a process to index, search and retrieve the asset. This is a huge time saver when it comes to production time, reducing overhead cost significantly and enabling the repurposing of video. The ability to search, view, browse, track, collaborate, and repurpose video content from a “central place is the master key for organizations looking to seamlessly and efficiently managing their video for monetization. There are several other extremely important benefits for having a DAM in place. For example, access and version control provides a level of security, which is not only important from a workflow perspective but also from the perspective of corporate compliance and governance. So, with a DAM in place an organization can benefit from faster and easier repurposing and publishing of video which reduces costs; greater control on its video through secure centralization, conditional access and reporting and uniform messaging to both internal and external users.
As we move forward into the future, the quantity of video is only going to keep getting larger. Video in the enterprise is here to stay and the biggest challenge that organizations need to face is the ability to secure, manage, repurpose and distribute this never ending content stream in a robust and scalable environment – anytime, anywhere and on-demand.
If you have additional comments or suggestions for my new friends, pipe in here and let them know they are not alone! Alternatively, if you are shy you can email me suggestions/comments mary@procoalitions.com