Are We There Yet?

This was something I heard a lot this past summer as I steered the minivan along the interstate toward a destination that seemed to be moving further away the closer I seemed to get. I think this can be akin to the process of setting out on the road to a successful DAM implementation. As you make progress the goal may seem to be moving further away.

A DAM is a continuously evolving process, to quote an earlier post..."a DAM is an Eco-system." All parts of this ecosystem are connected and need to work in unison. A successful DAM evolves to a natural balance. So, if it's evolving how will you know when you are done and for that matter...what is the definition of DONE?

"Done-ness" is a state that depends somewhat on the size of the endeavor and the enterprise. Implementing a digital asset management project for a small media archive may have a completion that is defined as when all the existing content that was not previously in a digital environment is now digitized, searchable, accessible in its digital form and available for use within a business unit or enterprise as needed. In a larger environment, it may be defined in phases or stages with milestones tied to timelines, budgets, strategic business initiatives, etc. and may span over the course of many years and budget cycles. In some ways this may be more analogous to highway maintenance...by the time you finish filling potholes, it may be time to start resurfacing the road again.

So does this mean we are on a treadmill that never ends? Do we ever catch up?...or do we continue to repeat the past?

Yes...No... Maybe.

The point is that there are different stages of done and recognizing this, learning from them and reaping the knowledge benefits can make the next phases more effective and easier to accomplish..and so on. You will build on the momentum you generate and want to be able to tap into that energy. It should be easier to evolve than to invent anew. Harness the power of the lessons learned to better at the next steps and beyond.

I believe inherent to a media asset and technology project is the reality that we can reach a balance between objectives and the state of the art. As technologies continue to improve we need to refine, reconfigure, migrate, upgrade, recreate and reprocess, etc. All toward the continuing evolution of the ecosystem we've created. We become the masters of the Darwinism of the process. Dinosaurs evolved then came birds, fish, reptiles and mammals. Could you still be an efficient and competitive player in your industry if you were still using index cards, binders, mimeograph machines, 8086 computers, phone modems and pre-windows software? Maybe...but not likely. We've all evolved as opportunities became available for advancement within the ecosystem.

So are we there yet? We'll we're here now and the view is pretty good...but I bet if we keep driving in the right direction the view will be even better.

___

By Philip Spiegel
PHILIP SPIEGEL - DAM Ideas
October 13, 2009
Link to original post: http://spiegelams.typepad.com/spiegel_ams/2009/10/are-we-there-yet.html

Digital Archiving Tool: Amnesty International’s ADAM

Image via Wikipedia

Link to original post: http://crlgrn.wordpress.com/
October 15, 2009

Amnesty International’s International Secretariat recently released an in-house digital archiving program called ADAM–Amnesty Digital Asset Management. The program, designed in conjunction with Bright Interactive, allows Amnesty field workers to upload digitally created photos, videos, and audio recordings into a central repository that all Amnesty members can access from within the organization. ADAM is a customized application of Bright Interactive’s “Asset Bank” tool which:

is a digital asset management system, enabling your organisation to create a fully searchable, categorised library of digital images, videos and other documents. It is a high-performance, cost-effective server application to enable you to manage digital assets – all that is needed to access it is a web browser (from Asset Bank).

The description for the product goes on to specify that the Asset Bank program that ADAM is built from is customizable, scalable, and multi-lingual.

Because the program is accessible through a web browser, field workers can submit their field materials from anywhere in the world, as long as they have an internet link (sometimes a challenge in the further reaches of the world). As users upload their digital materials, they fill in required fields for metadata and context information. Use and access restrictions are also recorded in the record for each uploaded item. At this point, uploading material into ADAM is voluntary, but according to AI’s digital archivist, response has been enthusiastic. The hope is that uploading material into ADAM will become standard practice for all field workers, thus streamlining archiving processes and making material readily available for AI reports and campaigns. This material could also potentially be available for scholarly and legal work by outside parties–always dependent, of course, on the access agreements that AI holds with the creators of the material and the individuals represented in images, videos, or audio recordings.

Currently, ADAM holds approximately 36,000 records, 159 of which are available for public viewing at the ADAM Web site. Though Web site visitors from outside of AI can’t access the full holdings, the public holdings allow you to see the types of information that ADAM users submit when they upload their digital documentation items. Information ADAM currently collects is as follows:

Descriptive

• Title of the video, image, or audio file
• Description of the content
• Keywords, or terms for searching and cataloging
• Campaigns that the item contributes to or was created for
• Tags
• Copyright type
• Copyright credit

Agreement Type:

• Agreement specifies the level of use that the creator of the piece and individuals represented within the piece permit within Amnesty International. Some items are publicly available and others are highly restricted.
• Agreement Notes specify additional use restrictions not covered in the standard agreements preset in ADAM
• Shotlist/Transcript information for video and/or audio material
• Date Created
• Creation Date Accuracy is a space for stating level of confidence for when the item was created.
• Place Created

Technical

• Size of the digital image, video or audio recording in terms of image density and/or memory space required for the file
• Orientation of images (landscape or portrait)

Admin

• ID, a catalog number assigned to the item by ADAM
• Date Last Modified
• Embedded Data
• Collections
• Categories

Related articles by Zemanta

• DAM software has enabled businesses to store and access all their digital intelligence within a single point of management (digitalassetmanagement.org.uk)
• Asset Management for Business in the Digital World (digitalassetmanagement.org.uk)

Why do I need permissions and roles in DAM?

By Henrik de Gryor on Another DAM blog (about Digital Asset Management)
Link to original post : http://anotherdamblog.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/why-do-i-need-permissions-and-roles-in-dam/
September 28th, 2009

Any Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution worth implementing across an organization should have the following:

• The ability to assign permissions or access to various tasks in the DAM. This includes permission to:
  • access assets and/or collections in the DAM
  • preview assets in the DAM
  • add/append/edit metadata to the assets in the DAM
  • upload assets to the DAM
  • download assets with transformations from the DAM
  • order assets (such as licensed assets in the DAM)
  • delete assets in the DAM
  • version assets in the DAM
  • report on assets in the DAM
  • do specific tasks with these assets from the DAM

• The ability to assign roles or groups of people who share the same permissions to do things in the DAM. At the very least, there should be at least a few roles available to assign any user of the DAM:
  • Administrator role often has full control of the DAM and is empowered with full permissions to do anything necessary including configurations.
  • Regular user role usually has limited permissions to do specific things such as preview assets and maybe download assets directly from the DAM.
  • If you wanted to expand to a third role, there is often a power user role. Typically, power users can do more than the average user, but less than the administrator. Often, a power user can upload assets to the DAM.

Depending on who in your organization is supposed to access what collections of assets and be able to do specific tasks with these assets, you may want to create a role which meets each criteria. Why use roles/groups rather than grant each individual user specific permissions one at a time? Well, how many DAM users do you have? Roles are a simple way to bunch groups of users together who need the same permissions. This way, permissions are granted in a uniform manner to users who fall in a specific user role. This can speed up the process of adding a new user or editing their permissions, instead of visiting each collection and permission for each individual user throughout the DAM.

• You could have user roles which can preview (read-only) specific collections of assets, but not other collections.
• You may have roles which can preview, edit, upload and download assets but not delete assets (such as your power user role).
• You may want a role which can preview and download from only one collection of assets relative to their job function because they often need to use or refer to just these assets.

I would not recommend allowing all users to have all permissions to do everything in the DAM (aka free for all) because that often leads to a lot of inconsistencies, accidents and chaos, particularly deletion.You probably had that before you had a DAM. So, why go back to those times? Do you miss the chaos and headaches for some reason? The idea here is to empower users within each user role to be able to access/do/see what they need in the DAM for their job function. Unless assets are restricted for specific uses or for specific eyes only, there is little reason to limit the access to previewing assets in the DAM, but it is up to the administrator and their management to decide what level of access should be granted to whom. If a user needs to access/do/see more (and is permitted to), permissions and roles can be changed by an administrator to allow more access and usability to users of the DAM.

How do you use permissions and roles within your organization’s DAM?

Statistics that have DAM Meaning

By Matthew Gonnerin, Broadcast Newsroom, Sep 14, 2009
Link to original article: http://software.broadcastnewsroom.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=843071&afterinter=true

While each customer will use DAM and judge its overall effectiveness differently, threads exist which can be measured

We probably have baseball and The Sporting News to thank for the proliferation of statistics in all sports. Yet, Mark Twain once said there are lies, damned lies and statistics. Of course, he was speaking about to the persuasive power of numbers and about how people will either promote or ignore statistics based entirely on whether or not they support a position. This "truth" is the reason many baseball arguments have never been settled. L

et me tell you something. Statistics are not going away. An entire industry of sports fantasy leagues is now flourishing because somebody found a way to get people to "compete" using statistics. It is human nature. You compare your stats to everyone else's to find out where you stand. Marketers and creative folks are no different. They want to know how they compare to others, including their use of digital asset management (DAM). We are well down the path of being able to begin providing this kind of information and have it be meaningful.

As a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider, we are in the unique position of having access to an aggregation of all of our customer's data. We know we have more than 50,000 users from 120 different countries. We see the amount of downloads taking place for digital content. We see what content is being used and repurposed. We see how much data is being consumed. We are literally sitting on a goldmine of data. It should be no surprise that marketing or brand managers would be interested in knowing what that data says. It behooves us to be constantly looking at it and to create ways to show our clients what they and others are doing while maintaining customer privacy within our strict security.

The majority of organizations invest in digital asset management solutions to improve interaction with their branded materials to maximize the investments made in the creation of images, videos, audio, creative files and other marketing materials. While each customer will use DAM and judge its overall effectiveness differently, enough common threads exist which can be standardized and measured in ratios, similar to financial statements.

We picked the following four ratios that we feel are most important to digital asset management.

• Digital asset activity ratio
• Repurposing ratio
• User activity ratio
• Digital asset consumption ratio

Digital Asset Activity Ratio: A comparison between the quantity of files that have been ordered and the amount of files stored in the application. This ratio provides insight into the relationship between download activity and all the digital assets stored in the application. For example, a low number for this ratio could mean that a marketing department may need to look at assets with high activity, compared to low activity. For instance, lifestyle images may have higher activity than static product shots. If so, marketing can shift their spending on creating assets.

Repurposing Ratio: A comparison between the active digital assets and the quantity of files ordered. This provides insight into the amount of content repurposing that is taking place over a period of time. Repurposing continues to be a key component of digital asset management value. A high number indicates that the same digital assets are being ordered by various users over a specific time period. A low number may point to a small set of users rarely ordering the same files over a given time period. Either way, this ratio speaks to activity that may call for an adjustment on spending priorities. A change in the number over time also gives you instant feedback whether adjustments you make are working.

User Activity Ratio: A comparison between the total number of logins and the quantity of users that have logged in provides information about visitation frequency. This metric also provides insight into how frequently users visit to browse or check back on new branded materials. These ratios provide confirmation of whether DAM is working in the specific areas of relieving a resources drain by internal staff and increasing brand reach. If the number is low, action should be taken to promote the system's use internally. It may involve a decision to include more training, focus on other types of digital assets, or change the way a client's users are interacting with the system.

Digital Asset Consumption Ratio: Comparing the quantity of files ordered to the users that logged into the system provides information on the amount of data being consumed by each user over a specific time period.

This ratio speaks to the original reason for DAM implementation. As mentioned earlier, the reasons vary from company to company. If a company wants to use DAM as a mass distribution tool, they will want to watch this ratio to make sure it is being used properly. If the numbers are low, the DAM application is being treated more as an archive than a "heavy use" application and could be addressed with more internal promotion of DAM.

Additional interpretations of all of these DAM ratios will continue to be developed. But right now, the numbers can be compared (vs. the average & medians) against historical activity within the same system or against historical activity across the entire customer base of the SaaS provider or even against the use of DAM by the provider itself. A SaaS provider should easily be able to supply its natural expertise on how to read and what to do with these ratios. For example, a user may be interacting with the system five times a month and in that month, he or she downloaded approximately ten files and of those ten files, half are being repurposed a hundred times. There is significant value in knowing this and what it means.

Regularly sharing and discussing information like this, in and of itself, should be a SaaS best practice. The ability to do so is a wonderful example of the most important "S" in SaaS : the service "S". It is a major distinction between SaaS and installed DAM software. Installed providers don't have the same kind of control over as much data because systems are deployed at individual sites. An installed provider doesn't automatically set things up to retrieve all of this data from their deployment sites and pull it back in so it can be analyzed. Why? Because doing so can be a pretty significant and costly project. It is a lot of rigmarole that, in many cases gets skipped. Not so with SaaS.

Matthew Gonnering is CEO of Widen Enterprises, a Madison,WI-based SaaS provider of digital asset management technologies.

DAM vendors vs. marketing agencies -- understanding the difference

By Theresa Regli, Analyst, CMS Watch, 14-Sep-2009
Link to original article: http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1685-DAM-Vendors-Marketing-Agencies

I'm currently advising two Fortune Global 1000 companies on a vendor short list for their upcoming digital asset management procurement. Both of these companies are focused on centralizing their brand assets, streamlining the cost to create multi-lingual print advertising and catalogs, and addressing light needs around managing video and audio.

Both of these clients heard me speak about the DAM vendor marketplace at recent conferences in New York and London, and once I started working with them in an advisory capacity, the first question both asked was, "Some of the vendors on our list aren't in your research, or you didn't talk about them in your presentation. Why?"

The short lists these companies initially put together included both DAM vendors as well as digital marketing agencies. The former, as we point out in out Digital & Media Asset Management research, are primarily in the business of selling software. They make the majority of their revenues from software licenses and hone products over many years to accommodate common scenarios. Digital marketing agencies, on the other hand, are primarily in the business of providing marketing services. They sell services to create brands, build ad campaigns, manage brand relaunches, and many other marketing needs. Occasionally, they also build custom tools to help their clients manage brand assets. Sometimes they host a common platform for all their clients (often based on the technology of one of the vendors we evaluate), and customize for their various clients as needed.

Digital marketing agencies are often entrenched in organizations for years, and may have a loyal internal client advocate selling them into other parts of any large global company. With one of my current clients, this was the case - one person was vehemently upset that the team wouldn't keep his favorite digital marketing agency on the short list for a DAM procurement, even though they didn't even sell a DAM product.

Understanding a vendor's core competency should be your first step before considering them for any short list. Coupling this understanding with a clear picture of your own needs will allow you to have the right combination to pinpoint vendors. If your needs are very simple brand asset centralization, perhaps your favorite digital marketing agency might be appropriate to host a central repository for you. But for large global organizations -- with dozens of agencies in multiple locations, enterprise integration requirements, and generating varied, multi-lingual and multi-channel output -- you need a serious piece of enterprise software.

Your preferred marketing agency likely has experience with many vendor tools, or might specialize in a few. But you should be sure to pick the tool that fits your scenarios best, and not take shortcuts by simply going with the one your favorite art director has experience with (or the one his company sells). Digital marketing agencies are a very important piece of successful brand management, but be sure to put them into the part of the puzzle where they really and truly fit.

Henry Stewart Business Briefing on DAM - Chicago, October 29th 2009

Managing Digital Assets is increasingly a core management discipline for both commercial companies and not for profit organisations alike. Henry Stewart Events is the leading provider of briefings for DAM managers worldwide - satisfying the need to know what is possible, how to achieve it and how to avoid the mistakes others have made. It covers the fundamentals, the new opportunities and the latest thinking on best practice – all from the user’s perspective. Clear, comprehensive, detailed briefings and case studies on “how to ….” and, “how we …” covering:

• Key Trends in DAM Today
• Metadata, Taxonomy and Search
• DAM Services Groups: the essential roles, accountabilities, and skills of a DAM Operation
• Rights management and enforcement
• Building a Business Case for DAM
• Developments in technology
• Internal training
• DAM in Marketing Operations Management
• Setting expectations for next generation DAM
• Real world case studies from Tribune Company, Motorola, Northwestern University, Wunderman and Willow Creek Community Church.

Who should Attend?

For everyone involved or likely to become involved in the management of digital assets in:
Airlines • Accountancy and Audit • Advertising and Marketing • Automotive manufacturing • Broadcasting • Construction, Architecture, Engineering and Real Estate • Defense • Education • Energy Supply • Financial & Insurance Services • Film • Food and Beverage • Gaming • Government and the Public Sector • IT • Legal Services • Leisure and Sport • Libraries, Museums, Galleries & Archives • Manufacturing in all its forms • Maritime trade • Media & Entertainment • Medical, Healthcare • Music • Pharmaceutical Development and Manufacturing • Publishing & Printing • Rail • Retail • Television • Telecoms • Transport • Utilities

Full documentation will be provided to all delegates and adequate time set aside for questions and discussion.

The Problem Panel

Submit your problem in writing prior to the briefing or on the day and have the expert panel members address it. Confidentiality fully respected if requested by you.

Link to Henry Stewart website for registration and information on optional tutorials pre- and post-event:

http://www.damusers.com/events/about.php?eventid=31&showme

Cost of storage for ECM & DAM: Part 2

I recently posted a piece regarding storage costs for ECM that seemed to garner some interest, so I thought I might just flesh out some of the assumptions I made in that a little further. The basic premise was that people who buy ECM and DAM systems tend to underestimate the cost of related storage, and typically do so by a wide margin. In addition to underestimating the costs, buyers typically underestimate the volume of storage required. Combined, these miscalculations can, and often do, prove to be very costly.

In my experience these miscalculations are generally due to either a misguided assumption that storage volumes and costs are falling to the point whereby they are not worth worrying about, or that the buyer has previous experience with a web content management system, and assumes that as storage was a minor issue then, so it will be a minor issue with a full blown DAM or ECM implementations. The reality is, nothing could be further from the truth.

First, some basics. Although the cost of 1GB of storage has plummeted over the years, the cost of managing the stored data has not. In fact enterprise storage costs have continued to rise year on year. It is easy, though wrong, to equate the cost of disk space with the overall cost of storage. Disk costs represent a very small part of the overall storage bill. Managing the structure, security and access to and from that stored data is what costs a lot more.

Even as disk space costs have plummeted, our appetite for filling those disks has grown at an even greater rate. ECM and DAM storage costs have risen more than most as they both manage bulky content files. The increased use of rich media, PowerPoint, Flash files, video, audio or even just the use of graphics in typical office documents has bulked up storage demands way beyond anything one could have predicted just a few years ago, lifting many multi-terabyte situations to the petabytes today.

As the sheer volume of content being stored has grown exponentially, so too has the realization that hidden amongst these volumes are actual items of real business value, and/or items that could get us into trouble if lost (or found). The need to address such related issues as backup for basic protection, disaster recovery to ensure that we can survive if everything gets hit in a single location, and of course archiving, ensures that we can separate and actively manage important content over the long term. Enterprises must do this to meet compliance and legal needs. All of these of course add considerably to costs, though they do enable content owners to sleep well at night.

Some buyers just want to push it all to "The Cloud" and if that works for them, great - but that is not necessarily a low-cost option. As a rough guide, 1 petabyte of storage will cost you around $150k per month using Amazon S3, yes, that's $1,800,000 per year. Of course one can argue that "The Cloud" does all the DR and Backup work for you so there could be cost savings there, but its still not exactly cheap. Yes I know not everyone will need a petabyte of storage, but my point remains valid, as you will likely need far more storage space than you think you do. Whether you end up with a fiber channel SAN courtesy of NetApp, Hitachi or EMC or you opt for the Cloud - you are going to pay out a lot of money.

But hold on a second: surely this all assumes that such costs are inevitable and indeed necessary, that the only error is the fact that you, the buyer, underestimated them? In fact the major error here is that most buyers of ECM and DAM systems are not thinking about using storage systems in the way they were designed to be used. Theoretically at least such systems allow you to clear out junk (irrelevant, duplicated or redundant) on an ongoing basis, and only manage key data or files. This behavior is sorely lacking from our content management routines. Moreover, better systems integrate well with most common storage options, providing fairly seamless retention and disposition management, in some cases even going so far as to help in the automation of tiered storage. But few buyers ever make any use of these features and they become little more than electronic buckets, buckets that get filled in random order.

So, what is the lesson here? Well maybe there is more than one lesson, for starters:

• You should always ensure that accurate storage calculations are an early and important of any ECM or DAM project
• Put proper content governance in place to ensure you're not paying for space you don't need (Consider that a business case for ECM and DAM can often be made simply based on the savings derived from an efficient retention and disposal process)
• Finally, the next time you hear somebody say that enterprise storage is getting cheaper and cheaper, hit them, they deserve it.

By: Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Analys, CMS Watch, 24-Aug-2009
Link to original article: http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1671-Storage-for-ECM-DAM-Part-2?source=RSS

Storage costs for ECM and DAM Systems

We have had an interesting internal discussion at CMS Watch the past few days, surrounding the cost of storage for content technology systems. It is a discussion that too few buyers have before embarking on costly ECM or DAM projects. Enterprises often assume that storage, just like networking, is simply a corporate IT overhead -- and maybe in your organization it is -- but that doesn't mean it's free.

So how much does storage cost? Well, it's like the answer to the question, how long is a piece of string....."it depends." But a better answer may be "more than you might think." In many cases much more, and quite often more than the cost of the application software and associated services will cost you.

The variables here revolve around the type of content you manage. If it's mostly html files, then the volume will not likely be too high. If on the other hand, it is typically Office files, or worse still Rich Media (such as video files) then your storage needs will shoot up. These days Terabytes of data are the norm; typical ECM installations have 25-50TB of content, and some run into the multiple Petabytes. And these numbers are only likely to grow as rich media and ever richer documents become the norm.

Another factor that can seriously impact your storage costs surrounds the issue of lifecycle management, and version control. If redundant files are moved off the live system to an active archive as and when they become redundant -- and in turn are destroyed when they reach the end of their lifecycle -- your storage costs will become more manageable.

If on the other hand, you just keep everything, the costs will skyrocket. In previous consulting engagements for large enterprises I have found less than 4% of the content sitting in file servers to be relevant: the vast majority of the content is out of date, duplicated, or not even business related (porn, recipes family photo albums, and the like). Good content housekeeping is just common sense.

So how much does storage cost? Well depending on your media of choice, 25TB will cost you anywhere from just under a $100k per year for a hosted service to $350k if you were to buy, install and manage the hardware in-house. If you get into the Petabyte category then you are in the millions to start the discussion.

You of course need to look at all the storage options, and understand that storage costs are not just as simple as calculating disk space. There are trade offs in terms of access, performance, and price between Direct Attached, SAN, and NAS options. You will likely end up with a mixed environment. Just as you also need to consider the cost and need for Disaster Recovery, Back-Up, and Archiving in addition to your primary requirements.

Likewise you will need to consider the physical distance between consumers and stored data. Don't let anyone kid you -- a file accessed in Tokyo sitting in a file server in New York will take longer to render than one sitting in Kyoto...

And yes, just in case you are thinking about it: to back up one Petabyte, you will need another Petabyte at least....soon adds up doesn't it?

There is a myth that storage is cheap; it's not cheap. Just because you see 1GB flash drives going for a song at your local store, does not mean that enterprise storage costs have plummeted. They haven't. Moreover, they are not going to, since our needs remain insatiable and are only set to grow. So next time you are considering investing in a system like SharePoint, FileNet, Artesia, or MediaBin, make sure you think through your storage needs carefully, and cost them realistically from the outset.

By: Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Analyst, CMS Watch
Link to original article: http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1662-ECM-DAM-Storage

Are we reaching the limits of UI buildout?

By Kas Thomas, Analyst
CMS Watch, 28 July 2009

As you can imagine, in the course of covering more than 200 software products, my colleagues and I get to see and touch a lot of different user interfaces, and one thing we've all noticed lately is the trend toward larger and larger interfaces. To put it bluntly, many products (particularly in the WCM and DAM spaces) now have client UIs that are just plain enormous. By enormous I mean busy and option-rich, with tons of controls, and often with a super high-resolution monitor required just to see the whole UI.

In the WCM world, products like Alterian Morello, SDL Tridion R5.3, Sitecore CMS, and TYPO3Canto Cumulus and Mediabeacon R3volution (among others), which have seen UIs grow in tandem with product functionality. (among others) have seen their user interfaces grow to the point where even power users find it challenging to learn the product -- and then stay current on it. The same is true, in the DAM world, for products like

UI sprawl is not limited to any particular tier or type of product, of course. Creeping featuritis has led to bewilderingly complex UIs for Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop, and countless other familiar software tools. In the Web CMS world, the problem seems to be compounded by a recent trend toward re-centralization of control and consolidation of roles in web publishing (just the opposite of the trend toward decentralization and specialization that was so common a few years ago) -- whereby power users dominate systems activity, and often system selection.

Looking forward, it's clear that "UI buildout" cannot continue much longer. For many products, cognitive overload is no longer a threat, but a reality. How many toolbars, tabs, nested menus, and clickable controls (not to mention nav-trees in which you have to scroll horizontally as well as vertically to find things) can a mere mortal handle? If a cognitive limit exists, I think we're pretty much there.

The question is, what can be done about it? Is there a way forward?

As a stopgap measure, simply hiding controls based on role can be useful. Many vendors make at least a token attempt to give you control over the visibility of important UI pieces based on a contributor's permissions.

As a whole, though, the industry needs to do a lot better in giving system implementers and admins the power to custom-configure task-based interfaces for different system personas. It can be very difficult (even impossible) in some systems to make a given command just not show up. It's hard to understand why that should be. Not everyone needs every command. Why put controls in a user's face if you don't have to? As noted UI expert Aza Raskin says, "If you notice the interface, that means you're thinking about the interface and not the thing you're trying to do."

It's been said that something like 45% of the features in a typical software system are never used, while another 19% are rarely used. That means the majority of executable code in a product seldom, if ever, executes. Clearly the opportunity exists to scale back UIs. The problem is, products with super-lean UIs don't demo well. In any featuritis arms race, the product that can stand up to the most overspecified RFP has a big advantage.

Maybe there are lessons here for all of us.

Vendors: Strip the UI to a skeleton and make it easy for implementers (and/or administrators, and/or power users) to add functionalities back one by one.

Customers: Stop "requiring the world" in RFPs and PRDs. This only exacerbates the featuritis arms race. And make sure non-tech-savvy casual users (not just power users) are properly represented on product selection teams. It's your non-techies who will push back hardest on hard-to-learn systems -- and ultimately decide the success or failure of the system.

We say it throughout our reports, but: Take time to do some usability testing of your own. Find out up front if a product's UIs are going to be a problem for your organization, and don't assume you can fix the problem with training. Training isn't the answer for users whose tired brains are already, even before you roll out the system, saying, Don't make me think.

More @ http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1652-UI-Bloat?source=RSS

Optimizing Digital Asset Management

Reblog from Business Management
E-Magazine

In an exclusive interview the IDC’s Melissa Webster talks to Business Management about the increasing emergence of digital asset management and the potential for the future of the sector.

“Increasingly what we see is companies wanting to design media and career assets that can be used online and in print, digital asset management can play an important role along that repository”
-Melissa Webster, IDC

Perhaps you could give us an indication of the types of challenges enterprises face when managing their digital assets?
Melissa Webster. First of all it’s a really fragmented market, mainly because there are so many different use cases. For example, if you are talking about the enterprise, typically the needs of the enterprise are revolving around management and marketing and you need to manage a library or repository of assets, which can be shared for worldwide marketing programs and that can be taken and reused by regional or local groups when they kick off their own campaigns. The assets can be marketing collateral, designed for print, web or radio, or they could be brand materials such as logos.

So, depending on what your business is, if you are a large brand manufacturer or consumer goods manufacturer, you are going to have a tremendous amount of content – some of it will be product photos, some of it will be rich media, such as video, audio or multimedia. You need to have expert metadata about your assets so that you can serve up the appropriate version to the right person, in context. Of course the digital asset management (DAM) system also provides the security, authorization and control over who actually says what. That’s part of the equation and it has worked for us for interesting assets and cataloguing them, but also when people use them and implement things like notification and approval workflows and so forth.

How does digital asset management refer to enterprise content management? Are the to related? Do they have unique functions and features?
MW. The difference really lies in the unique workflows, which need to be extremely specific in the case of digital asset management. The digital asset management system hopefully takes apart the asset into its component parts and storing these as separate assets in order that they can be reused in other creative ways without being redundant and then putting those assets back together when need be.

A digital asset management system can be used to help with problems around logo changing. For example, if I need to change the logo in 2000 brochures in 75 places than you can change the logo in one place and reflect that change throughout your current set of print brochures and on to websites. There is this notion that were used and the extensive linking of assets to each other, and we can call that level. There is the unique workforce for the creative process, which is a little different from what we do on the enterprise national side.

Do you see digital asset management as a subset of an enterprise content management system or something completely separate? Is it within an enterprise content management (ECM) solution or is it something that companies will be looking to purchase separately?
MW. That depends on the requirements. Certainly the enterprise content management vendors have for some time offered digital asset management systems. However, there is still a place for DAM solutions, even in organizations that have these ECM offerings from the top ECM vendors if your requirements are specialized. If you are a large print publisher, for example, it may be that your enterprise content management vendors digital asset management solution does not deal well in designed documents and doesn’t manage those components. If you are doing a lot of print publishing, perhaps you need to buy a DAM that is tailored to managing that kind of content because you need to manage the component level so that you can print different renditions or need to dynamically resize things for the web.

How does the increasing digitization of many different types of content and information add to this challenge?
MW. Well, on the one hand we have this tremendous explosion of digital content and that is the case inside the enterprise as well as on the consumer side – we all take more photos with our digital cameras for example. There is a huge distortion of digital content and one of the things that happens is that because everything is digital it is relatively cheap and everybody keeps everything.

On the flipside, having digital makes it so much easier to catalogue, find and search. You can immediately call information based on a search, watch a preview and verify that that is the asset you want, which makes life so much easier. The other thing that is so great about the digital world is that it is easy to create variance of that asset, it just takes a little code, whether that is a transcoding video or audio or whether you are taking a brochure apart and putting it back together in a new way with new ingredients. It is so easy to take, edit and revise different assets.

One of the things we are talking about in this issue is the idea of managing the customer experience across different platforms and channels. What role does DAM play in helping manage that customer experience for companies?
MW. The digital asset management system is a source of direct images, video, audio, the rich media and multimedia formats assets. It might be used in the context on a website with mass logos and text or the applications to enable transaction on that website and other commerce. The DAM is managing ingredients for that process. Increasingly what we see if companies wanting to design media and career assets that can be used be online and in print, so the digital asset management system can play an important role along that repository and surface the right assets for the right publishing point, although they it is not itself providing the web publishing capabilities, that is the job of the web content management system.

Where do you see the market heading next? Is there a major trend that you think will have a big impact on this particular sector?
MW. I certainly think that the trend seems to tightly connect the digital asset management system and the web content management system as an important trend. Increasingly among smaller web content management vendors are integrations with DAM systems and I believe we are going to see that more and more between the web publishing side and the digital asset management side.

We are seeing grand management applications on top of digital asst management systems to provide some of the out-of-the-box workflows that the marketing department needs, either to work internally across a large globally distributed marketing organization or to facilitate collaboration with their advertising and interactive agencies and stakeholders to help in their marketing.

Types of DAM
There are several broad categories of digital asset management systems, including:

• Brand asset management systems: With a focus on facilitation of content re-use within large organizations, here the content is largely marketing or sales related. For example, product imagery, logos, marketing collateral or fonts
• Library asset management systems: With a focus on storage and retrieval of large amounts of infrequently changing media assets. For example, video or photo archiving
• Production asset management systems: With a focus on storage, organization and revision control of frequently changing digital assets. For example, digital media production
• Digital supply chain services: With a focus on pushing digital content out to digital retailers. For example, music, videos and games

Growing need for digital asset management

Reblog from ZDNet News: Jul 21, 2009
By Hassan Kotob, President and CEO of North Plains Systems

Commentary - Digital asset management, or DAM, has often been described as a process or a tool for organizing the creation, management, distribution, and archiving of rich media assets. In the DAM world, the term “assets” generally refers to rich media files such as images, photos, video and audio, whereas a “file” generally refers to email, documents, records, or scanned images. Creative agencies, publishers and media outlets have long realized the wisdom of utilizing DAM solutions for producing media assets, managing digital rights, conferring with clients, handling review cycles, retouching images, and editing photos and videos.

The growing need for digital asset management
Today, it’s increasingly common for businesses of all kinds to produce corporate videos and podcasts, e-Learning modules, YouTube clips, training materials, brand identity graphics, and more. DAM systems bring order to the creative process involved with producing and leveraging these assets to their fullest extent.

A recent Forrester report noted, “With technologies like digital cameras and inexpensive authoring tools driving asset creation costs down, digital assets are greatly increasing in number and these rich media are being used across a wider range of enterprises. Inadequate management of these growing libraries, however, will make reusing and repurposing difficult, leading many organizations to take another look at DAM.”1 Analysts at IDC concur: “IDC believes the digital asset management market will enjoy a compound annual growth rate of more than 25 percent during the period of 2006-2010, outperforming the overall content management market…and the software market as a whole, by a wide margin…DAM will remain an independent and lively market…given the specialized requirements of DAM solutions.”2

The benefits of DAM
Organizations deploying specialized DAM solutions typically realize the following benefits:

• Consistent messaging and brand — With built-in revision control, asset repurposing, and approval processes, DAM systems enable organizations to maintain consistent use and re-expression of digital assets, from brochures to corporate videos to web content.
• Generation of new revenue streams — Many organizations have built new business opportunities around the creation of high-value content for internal and external clients by repurposing their assets such as using book covers to promote books online. Consider a photo that costs tens of thousands of dollars to create each and every time. With DAM, it can be reused. Without DAM, its existence may not be known and the re-creation costs are incurred once again.
• Cost savings — Organizations gain a return on their investment through the elimination of redundant asset creation efforts and the ability to quickly retrieve assets.
• Digital media management and distribution — DAM systems enable the efficient organization, indexing, and distribution of digital assets. Advanced DAM systems provide a distributed architecture and multi-site asset storage, as well as the ability to provide multiple repositories for self-synchronization of both assets and their associated metadata.
• Global web-based access — Organizations can distribute digital masters and other types of licensed assets via secure web access. Advanced DAM systems also provide asset ordering and fulfillment modules, and can easily integrate with existing e-commerce and transaction servers.

Vetting DAM solutions
Select a digital asset management system based on your creative needs. This may include management of your organization’s creative assets, managing broadcast and post-production workflows, media enhanced e-learning, video-on-demand repositories, multi-channel distribution, personalized publishing on-demand, and more. Most businesses today will find it beneficial to use a solution that also manages the video creation, editing, collaboration, and management process. This involves ease of integration with video editing applications, video usage standards, and broadcast workflows. Questions you may want to consider before investing in a digital asset management solution include:

• Does the DAM solution provide seamless integration with creative authoring tools such as Adobe Creative Suite and Quark or digital editing suites such as Avid and Apple's Final Cut Pro?
• Is “work-in-progress” supported by this DAM solution, or does it simply provide the ability to archive your organization’s assets? Some DAM and ECM solutions provide only the archiving capabilities.
• Is this a “best of breed” DAM solution? Be wary of vendors who try to be all things to all customers. Give preference to a best of breed DAM solution over an ECM or MRM (Marketing Resource Management) solution that also offers limited DAM functionality which may not meet your requirements.
• Can the solution scale? Be sure to select a DAM solution that has the ability to keep up with the growth of your organization and its requirements. And of course, if you are thinking of an enterprise-wide or global implementation, the ability for your DAM solution to easily scale is a necessity.

Conclusion
Until recently, many enterprises have not realized the great need for DAM solutions. The ability that DAM has to manage both documents and digital assets is extraordinary. While many general content management vendors offer basic DAM functionality, they have lost touch with the collaborative process that is so integral to the creation and management of rich media assets. These systems may support the ability to attach static images or even short video clips. However, the proper management of rich media assets requires a more sophisticated approach.

Forward-thinking organizations recognize the need for solutions designed from the ground up to support the creative process. Selecting the best solution that meets your requirements enables organizations to leverage the expertise of both knowledge management and artistic teams to their fullest extent.

NASA erased moon footage - What's the value of your digital assets?

Image via Wikipedia

On July 20th 1969, Neil Armstrong was the first man to set foot on the moon. To commemorate the 40th anniversary of this historic event, NASA releases restored videos of the lunar excursion.

NASA admitted that it must have erased the original videos of the live TV transmission so that it could resuse the videotape. In the 1970s and '80s, NASA had a shortage of the tapes, so it erased about 200,000 of them and reused them.

The space agency admitted that "A three-year search for these original telemetry tapes was unsuccessful. A final report on the investigation is expected to be completed in the near future and will be publicly released at that time."

NASA senior engineer Dick Nafzger said a the search led to the "inescapable conclusion" that 45 tapes of Apollo 11 video were erased and reused. Nafzger, who was in charge of the live TV recordings back in the Apollo years, said they were mostly thought of as data tapes. It wasn't his job to preserve history, he said, just to make sure the footage worked. In retrospect, he said he wished NASA hadn't reused the tapes.

What's the value of your digital assets? Make sure you can trust you Digital Asset Management software to provide maximum security and searchability for your assets.

Read more:
NASA lost moon footage, but Hollywood restores it (AP)
NASA Releases Restored Apollo 11 Moonwalk Video (NASA)

Open source: it's just a license

By Adriaan Bloem, Analyst, on CMS Watch

A lot of my time is spent evaluating technology, and I have a confession to make: the licensing is one of the least spectacular bits to review. It's certainly relevant, and always one of the things we discuss, but it rarely makes the top-10 issues in a review.

As a student, I spent some time studying information technology law, and I'm still intrigued by the legal technicalities of Apache, GPL, LGPL, and other open source licenses. I will also, from time to time, read the fine print of commercial licenses. Your legal department will probably want to do the same. But you should ask yourself this: is the license really a decisive factor when picking software?

Oddly enough, with open source, it often is. In many European countries, governments are actively pushing for the use of "open source" and "open standards." On a superficial level, that makes a lot of sense. Who'd want vendor lock-in, or extortion by an integrators' truck system? Think of all the advantages. Who doesn't want global interoperability? How could you possibly resist the ability to shape and mold software to your liking? And best of all, it's free!

Of course, in reality, things aren't quite so black and white. First of all, I have to keep repeating that open source isn't gratis ("think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer"). The "free" refers to a model of development and innovation, not to a matter of cost. Get out your calculator and tell me this: what's more expensive over the course of three years. Software that's $30K up front, with a 15% annual maintenance and support fee; or software that's "free," but with $15K a year in "gold support"? Or, if you're planning on doing it yourself, one FTE? It's just an example, but you get the point -- it's very hard to do an enterprise implementation cheap, whichever way you turn it. Large companies like IBM aren't in open source because they've suddenly become philanthropists.

So maybe the real reason is development. You can take the open source software and change it. That may be true, but "closed source" doesn't mean to say you can't modify the code that's on your servers. It's usually a bad idea -- your changes may be lost with the next update -- but then again, the same could happen with open source software's next release. Sure, often you can't really touch compiled commercial code; but how many actually modify and recompile open source C? If you're a software company, developing on the basis of open source, you may want to actively participate in an open source community and help develop the code. But if you're not, all you may want out of the community is free support: see the previous paragraph.

In reality, not only is there a large gray area between black and white, there are plenty of zebras, as well. There's commercial open source, there's shared source, there's community open source, there's community editions, there's open sourced commercial software. There's open source without much of a community, and commercial closed source with a large and active community. There's a lot of mature and stable open source software, and a lot of new and untested commercial software. It's hard to apply any clichés to such a broad spectrum.

There's only one thing you can generalize: open source is a specific kind of license. And discussions about which license is better are rather academic. What you'd want to decide on is what your software should do, if and how you want to customize it, and how easy it is to get support when you need it. That means doing your homework, and finding out the real story: you'll certainly want to know what's behind the facade. And that's something that applies to software under any license.

Reblog from CMS Watch, http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1642-Open-source:-it%27s-just-a-license, 13 July 2009

What Wimbledon and vendor selection have in common

By Theresa Regli, CMS Watch

As Murraymania swept the UK, I settled into my Court No. 2 seat on Wimbledon's always-action-packed middle Saturday. In addition to the matches of Serbia's Ivanovic, Australia's Hewitt, and Russia's Safina, I had a great view of the Centre Court scoreboard, so during breaks I was keenly watching the results of Andy Roddick's match.

"Andy's got the first set," I said to my cousin, who's studying in London and joined me for the day. "Andy's not playing yet," interjected the Brit to the other side of me. "Yes he is," I said. Pause. "Oh you mean, your Andy," he replied. "Right," I smiled back, "not your Andy, who plays tonight." Then came the most interesting comment: "Well, he's not really my Andy," the gent said. "I'm English, and he's Scottish."

Territorial rivalries are perhaps more pronounced in sport than any other pastime, be it the Boston Red Sox vs. the New York Yankees, the Calgary Flames vs. the Edmonton Oilers, or the New Zealand All Blacks vs. the Australian Wallabies. Such territorial rivalries aren't altogether absent from the content management vendor selection process, either, and I find this much more pronounced on the eastern side of the Atlantic than in my native North America.

Of course, in Europe and the UK there are many nations and territories (both political and historic) in a comparatively tiny geographic area, which makes a perfect petri dish for such rivalries to fester.

When I work with clients or subscribers to help them select vendors, the two or three finalists often end up being very technologically similar, and once tools have been tested and deemed appropriate for clients' environments, the conversations just prior to final selection often become very much "cultural." It's not just about whether the team is qualified, and if the support line is open when their time zone is open for business. It's also about who they are, and when a few hundred thousand sterling or euros are on the table, the rivalries come out in closed-door conversations.

• "They're Belgian -- there's so many jokes about Belgium. Isn't there a reason for that?"
• "They're Dutch -- so they're blunt, that's good, right? Aren't the Dutch cheap, too?"
• "They're German -- so regimented -- is that right for us? What if the schedule slips, will they charge us double?"
• I wouldn't even know where to start on the Scandinavian rivalries, which go back to the days when Sweden and Denmark traded off conquering the whole of Northern Europe.

I end up spending quite a bit of time talking with clients about how they can benefit from vendor characteristics that are different from how their company normally functions. A bit of German organization and Dutch bluntness can be a great thing if your company has neither. I also watch vendors make an extra effort to bring in the "local flavor" to meetings -- someone from the local country or territory, if headquarters is on the other side of the continent. This always makes a big difference to buyers -- more than I believe it should. The English sales guy in the meeting in London isn't going to be the one you'll be working with, or providing you the ongoing service you'll need. Good service is good service, regardless of where it's provided from.

As an American who does a lot of work in Europe and the UK, I also experience trepidation on the part of some buyers. "Oh, you're American," I sometimes hear when I connect with a potential client via phone or meet up in person. Well yes, but CMS Watch is also a UK Limited Company, and one of our Principals is a Brit, and I'm perfectly happy to use the word "whilst" and drink a warm beer with you after work, if it makes you more comfortable. (Note: Americans can be even more blunt that the Dutch.) Expertise may be what matters in the end, but it's far from the only factor when closing a deal.

Stereotyping is dangerous, and as the world becomes smaller, you the technology buyer need to think more about benefiting from that which may seem foreign or "too different" for your organization. Yes, chemistry is important, but suppliers should be adept enough to adapt to your environment, and yet bring new approaches and attitudes to the project to help you be successful. Be it tennis or a vendor competition, the most appropriate mix of factors need to come together to create success, and sometimes those characteristics may not be the ones you're used to, or possessed by your fellow countryman.

As for my final take on Wimbledon: I wish Rafael Nadal wasn't injured. I'd love to see Federer break the majors record, but I'd be just as thrilled to see Roddick pull through. I don't care where Andy Murray is from, I'll cheer for him to play well, along with anyone willing to call himself a Briton.

May the best player win, wherever he's from.

Reblog from CMS Watch, http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1636-Wimbledon-Selection#idc-container, 2 July 2009