The innovator's guide to strategic DAM replacement or consolidation

Early digital asset management (DAM) systems were a lot like digital filing cabinets. As long as all your team needed was to store same-type assets and distribute them within your marketing department, DAM 1.0 worked just fine.

However, that’s not the reality of today’s business environment.

DAM is no longer just for marketing. Rich media assets — things like video, audio, web code and animation — are now a foundational component of the digital supply chain that stretches across the entire enterprise. Content itself is more dynamic and voluminous in nature, and it requires a modern DAM.

If you’re using a first-generation DAM solution, it’s probably at its breaking point. Likely, your team has gone through iterations of ad-hoc workarounds.

That type of asset management isn’t sustainable. It’s time to look into what innovative teams need to capitalize on DAM.

9 signs your legacy DAM is creating more problems than solutions

The traditional DAM is sometimes referred to as “the place where assets go to die.” Despite the initial promise of collaboration, many older DAM platforms have limitations that render them unusable. The following list explores some of the practical limitations of a legacy DAM:

1. Poor to no integration with corporate permissions directory, making access to assets for anyone outside of marketing difficult.

2. Incomplete and inconsistent results because it relies on manually entered tags, keywords and metadata (which also affects search engine optimization when the assets are used on the website).

3. Poor, or lack of, integration with web content management systems (WCMS), making it impossible to share assets from the DAM within the CMS.

4. Cannot share assets with external partners, often causing the creation of duplicate assets.

5. Limited or no reporting functionality, causing rights management issues, compliance challenges, asset expiration date inconsistencies, etc.

6. Size restraints on rich media assets and lack of asset management capabilities such as transcoding, automatic tagging and playback difficulties.

7. Manual processes for tracking and recording stock imagery from a third-party source and reliance on users to record and archive correctly.

8. Inability to bulk upload assets, causing massive backlogs, usability issues and incomplete collections.

9. The inevitable development of individual “workarounds” and an overreliance on other storage systems.

Keeping up with evolving technology can be cumbersome, confusing and expensive. However, not keeping valuable technology up to date with current business demands can end up being just as a big a problem.

Let’s discuss the risks of keeping a legacy DAM when it’s not carrying its weight anymore.

Powerful data goes undocumented and unused

Content and data should be treated with equal importance. Data is the connective tissue that holds a business together. Think about the everyday conversations that happen when teams work manually. They ask each other questions like:

• When was this made?

• Where can I use it?

• Is it available in a different size, format or length?

• Who’s in it?

• What’s it about?

These are all data questions. And the data that matters to your photo studio is different than the data that matters to your campaign team, your product designers and the web team.

Each needs their own contextual data (metadata) to be represented, their own key systems (product information management, master data management, talent management, web content management, etc.) to work hand in hand with your core content system on their own terms (with their own data models).

So, the content system needs to be flexible enough to integrate and sync data in a variety of forms and contexts.

Letting assets go to waste

The use of digital assets is proliferating, and it’s not just about marketing messages anymore. Chances are your company needs a more omnichannel content delivery approach and/or needs better access to assets — from documents and image files to code and 3D models. Trying to manage all of this across multiple systems is inefficient and a recipe for disaster.

If your legacy system can’t deliver the right assets when needed, it’s likely your team is losing time and money with redundant work. Lost assets get requested … again. Whether it’s an entirely redundant photo shoot or the re-creation of graphics and copy to be used across multiple platforms (and in many slightly varying specifications), resources are wasted. And it’s not just the cost of re-creating; the lost opportunity cost of getting campaigns to market quickly add up, too.

> Learn more | Maximizing your digital asset management ROI

Compromising brand consistency

The story of your brand is told through specific imagery, voice, colors and tone — keeping those things consistent across multiple channels is challenging, especially when multiple teams, individual contributors and contractors contribute to the work. However, in today’s digital world, it’s critical that your outward presentation adheres to your brand standards so you can capitalize on the loyalty and recognition your brand has built, regardless of where it’s popping up in your target customers’ digital consumption ecosystem.

Lack of relational visibility

Remember that assets are often chained together in complex relationships, and many assets are derivatives of others (e.g., a Facebook ad derived from a web banner), or are inputs to a compound asset (e.g., text, image and logo combined into a brochure). Properly characterizing and maintaining these relationships is critical to avoid getting bogged down in updating the logo on 1,000 assets or scrambling to find every video that featured your celebrity influencer who just had a meltdown and became a liability.

Security is compromised when users go rogue

Many traditional DAM platforms impose complicated and time-consuming processes on users, despite how the types, volume and accessibility needs of content has evolved. It’s no surprise, then, that users go rogue and create ad-hoc processes to bypass the limitations of the DAM system.

When users create their own paths, they do so out of desperation. They want systems that let them find, use and produce content easily, but that’s not what they have.

With those maverick moves, you may also be introducing security vulnerabilities. Your DAM system’s policies and procedures are designed to keep your content secure, as long as everyone follows them to the letter and handles the assets as prescribed.

Inability to meet personalization goals

First-generation DAMs weren’t built to support the dynamic assets or their infinite iterations and uses. Without a modern DAM, it’s difficult for companies to achieve goals around marketing personalization. The pursuit of real-time personalization across channels at scale is a key challenge to organizations managing marketing assets. A next-generation DAM supports the management of this more atomic content, its relationships and its derivatives for delivery across different channels.

Think about how assets can be broken up and reassembled. To empower people to reuse, rework and automate content production at scale, think about how your systems can leverage individual components of compound assets — like the individual shots in a 360-degree product view or the original InDesign file of a PDF brochure. If you’re creating content for the web, social and print, where are you storing text, HTML and CSS in a way that can be recombined and reused within and across these different systems? Asset management is about much more than images and video.

A modern DAM differs from legacy solutions in several ways, including:

• Artificial intelligence capabilities

• Open source foundation

• Scalability

• Cloud-native architecture

Next-generation DAM systems have the potential to fully power the content factory at scale because they’re using the latest technology. Here are some must-have features in a modern DAM.

Artificial intelligence capabilities

Handling and understanding the vast amounts of content being generated has reached the point where purely manual processes cause significant delays, errors and compliance issues.

The modern DAM need: Incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) that enables programmatic cataloging and metadata creation based on what’s found in the assets. A modern DAM should allow teams to easily build, test and adjust their own ML models based on their specific needs, as well as methods for introducing a human-in-the-loop process to check and refine the ML results by leveraging subject matter expertise.

You might like: Reduce image hide-and-seek with AI in DAM

Open source foundation: API-first

A DAM solution needs to be integrated with systems across the organizations, from HR and Legal to web content systems and social media.

The modern DAM need: An open and documented API philosophy that allows connectors and data bridges to build a true enterprise content ecosystem. Being able to support anything from no-code configuration to full source code modification, with plenty of low-code options thrown in, helps your team stay agile.

You might like: Why you should choose an open source DAM solution

Scalability

Traditional DAMs are limited by the size of the servers they are connected to.

The modern DAM need: For storage to be easily scaled up or down as required, usually using the versatility of the cloud. Business rules can be built to manage the movement of little-used assets to less costly, specialist archiving services. A next-generation DAM will grow with you as your needs change and expand.

Cloud-native architecture

When cloud-native platforms entered the market, many legacy DAM vendors simply hosted their existing applications over to the cloud in an attempt to move away from their traditional on-premises, perpetual license model. While this is admirable because it moved the burden of system maintenance away from the customer, it’s a flawed approach in that the architecture was never designed for the cloud — which can cause major operational issues.

The modern DAM need: Cloud-native DAM architecture, meaning the solution:

• Is designed to be delivered via the cloud

• Has a modular, scalable architecture

• Provides incredible performance and cost-saving benefits

You might like: 6 benefits of DAM in the cloud

Integrated and automated workflows

Traditional DAMs require all users to work the same way. Yet that rarely matches the reality of a company’s operational processes. Most companies, even those within the same industry, or even different groups within the same company, will work slightly differently.

The modern DAM need: The ability to design and implement automated workflows within the platform, but also seamlessly integrate with other workflow or project management systems that may already be in use.

You might like: A beginner’s guide to DAM workflows

The innovator’s checklist for evaluating new DAMs

1. Can it manage content across multiple systems?

2. Can it be used as more than a repository for final assets?

3. Can it connect upstream creative and business processes to downstream distribution channels?

4. Was it built for the cloud from the ground up (not an older application simply ported over to the cloud)?

5. Is it based on a content services platform that can accommodate a number of different content management use cases beyond images and video?

6. Can your needs be addressed through upfront configuration rather than expensive one-off customization efforts?

7. Can the DAM adjust to your future storage needs? Will it scale both up and down? Make sure it has an archival strategy.

8. Does it have a documented API, and can it only be integrated with applications from different vendors?

9. What body of images does AI get its knowledge from? Can you train it on your own image library to develop your own business-specific learning models?

10. Does it have flexible workflows that allow you to work the way you want to with the tools you want?

11. Does it have an open marketplace, where packages are available to extend functionality and integration?

The AI-powered Nuxeo for DAM is a leader in modern digital asset management. Nuxeo for DAM’s open source foundation, extremely high-performance scaling and its AI-infused and cloud-native architecture sets it apart.

Connect with a Hyland representative today and start your DAM journey.