Otec and pics.io

There are many solutions to choose from when it comes to managing image, media and marketing collateral files which go into marketing automation and content creation workflows. Larger organizations can leverage an enterprise system, but most organizations need a simple cost effective solution.

In many cases the next step is to look at more traditional SaaS and cloud DAM solutions. Just sign up and start using it. The problem is that most of these are not prices like simple solutions. The advantages are clear: no IT involvement required; one-stop solution – they provide everything; one stop for support. 

Once you start pricing though, it becomes clear that you can get storage cheaper almost anywhere else – often one tenth the price –  but their solution is bundled. However, you can get DAM functionality and get you storage from someone who is competitive in that arena.

This is precisely why Otec Solutions started working with pics.io last year. They have a DAM solution with the type of functionality required by DAM users but they don’t sell you the storage. The DAM system connects you to your own google drive. So, whatever great deal you or your company have with Google, it is completely leveraged by pics.io and you aren’t locked into whatever they want to do. Google has to compete with the world and will always be competitive.

One other advantage of this model is that you are always in control of your files because they are on your Google Drive. If you decide to change vendors, there is no requirement to extract all of your data in the process because it is on your Google Drive.
There are also add-ins for the Adobe CS suite – try it out at: https://pics.io/?utm_source=partner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=otec_solutions

Why is Digital Asset Management (DAM) so hard to explain?

We all grasp content. We spend significant portions of our days consuming content – at work, on our mobile devices, at home. Content speaks to us. Digital assets are misunderstood. They are the pieces which, when combined to create content, become a story. Alone, they are someone else’s concern.

Digital assets sit on a file system or a web drive with very limited search capabilities and weak taxonomy. Housing and managing digital assets isn’t really the end use of those assets. The assets appear as content in presentations, articles, websites, catalogs and social media. This is where they are accessed and consumed. The fact that they are shared and accessed easier from a DAM is not relevant to many consumers. It is relevant to the creators.

Challenging Value Proposition

I attended The State of DAM webinar recently, hosted by Frank DeCarlo. Panel member Carin Forman, Director, Digital Photo Services for HBO said others assumed HBO would have a huge budget for a DAM system. After all, their business is content and managing the digital assets for that content should be paramount. Yet, she found the only way she was able to justify the purchase of a DAM was the cost reduction in storage media and couriers involved in sharing her assets without a DAM.

Revenue generation draws more investment than cost reduction. The typical ROI for DAM is based on cost reduction with the added justification of brand security – a fancy way to say you don’t want old or inappropriate assets representing your brand. There are exemplary uses such as museums and archives where thoughtful metadata schemas are deployed and the DAM can actually present to the consumer. The prevalent use is by marketing departments with brand libraries accessed directly by general corporate users for presentations. These are the straightforward cases.

Visibility

DAM really has a visibility problem. It isn’t required to bill clients or produce sales – though they improve this. They sit in between other higher profile systems. There are few organizations which would consider a DAM before ERP, ECM or PIM. However, once they have those, DAM systems become much more compelling. DAM answers these questions:

• How do I get decent images in my PIM?
• How do I get images and video to my website?
• How do I get approved brand collateral to marketing and sales?
• How do I manage approval of my brand collateral?
• How do I reduce the time for associates to find files?

Innovation

Do DAM systems lack innovation? In the same The State of DAM webinar, Dave Diamond, author of the DAM Survival Guide, voiced his frustration over the lack of innovation, pointing out that it pre-existed Google and does many of the same things. I take a bit of a different view, pointing back to the centrality of DAM, that there is only so much room for improvement in DAM simply because DAM isn’t really used so much as consumed because it sits in the middle of the other systems which use its assets.

DAM should be invisible. It should have been built into the OS decades ago. It has partially arrived in the form of web widgets which could be included in Google Docs, Sharepoint, Office 365, Basecamp and Slack etc. functioning much like the ubiquitous File-Open but with much better search. These exist but more in customization than part of DAM. Most DAM systems already have integration with Adobe Creative Cloud. AI is another area of innovation. So far the main one in use is AI-based metadata tagging and it yields pretty good results.  This example uses Clarifai:

This provides a painless way to enrich metadata with almost no effort. This doesn’t replace a proper taxonomy but you don’t have to start with a blank slate. Another feature is facial recognition, which also helps enhance metadata.

Who Buys?

Typically, those wanting a DAM system are those hurt the most by not having one.This tends to be people in marketing who are handling media files and distributing them for public consumption.

They need efficiency in the collaboration process and they also need to ensure the wrong files don’t make it to the public. E-mail is unreliable because there are size limits which depend on the organization, as well as security issues. File sharing like Dropbox works but it requires manual work – sending a share, managing permissions and it intrinsically has 2 transfers, is duplicated and has no versioning. DAM implements business process automation and enforcement by managing approvals, DRM, workflows and automation.

The most motivated adopters are usually those who have had a DAM system before and find themselves in a situation without one. A large retailer hired a leader at one of our clients and they knew they had to get a DAM system before they started in-sourcing any of their content production. A large ad agency found themselves without a DAM system after a division spin-off and asked us to implement a DAM system on a very short timeline. Those who’ve had one can’t live without one.

Every organization needs a DAM system. Organizations vary greatly in size so often one of the first considerations is what platform to choose: SaaS/Cloud or on premise. At one time this would have been viewed as a very backwards way to approach your investigation of a solution. Consultants would tell their clients to look at requirements first and map to functionality and then find some candidates to investigate further. Traditional benefits of DAM such as:

• Find assets/files fast
• Enrich assets with metadata and organize them
• Share assets securely with remote users (workers and consumers)
• Granular control of permissions
• On the fly media renditions
• Workflows for both process and approval
• Process automation
• Integration with other systems
• Centralize control and costs
  …are assumed to be part of any solution you would consider.

DAM – and development – has matured to the point where most systems have most of the functionality required. How the solution fits into your workflow and the other platforms and software you use, can actually make or break a candidate system as easily as budget can. Functionality is less important than it used to be because most good purveyors of DAM systems use rapid development disciplines so features can be rolled out more easily and integrations are much more feasible because APIs are web services able to be used in almost any development environment.

Some platform choices are pre-decided. Companies will mandate a SaaS solution because they do not have the IT bandwidth to maintain it in-house or because strategically, they have decided to go with hosted/cloud solutions. Where there is actually a choice to be made, there are a number of factors which are very important to be aware of as well as lesser factors. The really important factors are:

Access Speed
Many will tell you speed with today’s internet is a non-issue. This is particularly the case with ubiquitous mobile users. This is very often true. If your use case is to share smaller files in the single to low double digit MB range it is a non-issue. A solution for sales and marketing to share collateral with a few added features like being able to build slide decks should not really impact platform.

Authoring solutions with workflow can be entirely different though, especially when high quality imagery or video is involved. The files are often 100’s of MB in size or much larger, especially with video and they aren’t getting any smaller with better cameras. These don’t move around the internet as smoothly, especially in a production environment where investments in gigabit and 10 gigabit ethernet have been made to keep production moving smoothly. Adobe CC Photoshop and Premiere users who are used to loading files at gigabit LAN speeds will take a significant productivity hit trying to work directly over the internet.

Integration with Other Systems
A smaller number of solutions require a defined integration so this won’t affect as many people looking for a solution. A greater number will like to keep their options open as they have intentions of future integration – often with a CMS. If you have definite integration plans, it is worth looking at the API capabilities of prospective solutions. Good APIs are prevalent in on premise systems where the owner must secure them but might not exist or be robust enough on some SaaS solutions.

Regulatory Issues
Government and institutional users often have requirements that their data and even their system reside in their country. This is especially important because of caching and remote backup as copies of your data can be located on the other side of the globe. Terrorism has made this an even greater concern because it initiated changes to access to information policies which can allow host governments ability to breach assumed privacy. We have seen this in legal cases as well from a number of governments and even the Patriot Act in the US. This is a requirement for some and a non-issue for others but worth understanding the consequences.

When considering a platform it is also good to know that many solutions offer a number of different options. SaaS is a service completely hosted by the provider. Benefits include: no IT Involvement; no hardware investment; continual access to latest updates.

On premise solutions are traditional installations of software on hardware provided by the owner. There are also hybrid solutions which vary greatly as to where the system is and where the data is located. If you want a full-featured solution with the ability to move on premise if you choose, you can simply host your “on premise” solution with an IaaS provider. We have done this with Google and Azure and it would also be easy with Amazon.

You can also mix and match by storing your assets on a different provider. You could have your system hosted in the US and your data hosted in Canada. This is actually becoming much more common with Microsoft opening Azure located in other countries and Amazon doing the same with S3. They are also guaranteeing it doesn’t leave that country. There are also performance hybrids to address special media like video where the video can be stored on a CDN (content delivery network) so that all the renditions and device specific requirements are handled by the CDN.

Don’t feel compelled to choose between SaaS or on premise. You can use parts of both to get a solutions to fit your needs.

DAM has really reached its maturity. There are lots of people writing all kinds of articles about it and the evangelists and consultants who used to be fixtures, have moved on to more cutting edge disciplines. While I like the fact that there is more to read, as often happens, a lot of it is the same. A good portion of it is also remarkably negative navel gazing which is surprising considering much of it comes from within the vendor community. It seems there is too much emotion for so little information.

I think where DAM is at is extremely exciting. At this point, a new buyer can pick any of the more common systems and be relatively guaranteed of a successful implementation. Sure there are subtle improvements to come which better tie in use of assets with different applications, social media and websites. The truth is, any DAM system not nourishing dung beetles has a decent UI, a great API and is robust enough to run in almost any organization. Furthermore, the API has already been used to integrate it with multiple CMS, ERP, PIM, publishing, e-commerce, productivity and cloud systems. There are many DAM systems which fit this description and have competent people to implement them. This is very exciting. You don’t have this much choice in Office software or creative software. You can’t implement a CMS, ERP or PIM as easily.

Vendors can say what they want, but success of the system is up to the client. That is why it is so important to get the client excited about the possibilities and also let them know about the commitment that will be required. As is expected, the more sales focussed vendors could care less and just want to complete the sale and collect the money. This is why, when you look at the client list of each vendor, they seem to be the same. Do all of these large companies really own multiple DAM systems? Sure they do. In fact, we had one client we sold into twice and in between these sales – to two different departments – we demonstrated to all of them how they could work on the one existing system together. Functional silos, different departments and… we had a new sale to another department. Obviously, this is DAM gone wrong, but the point is, the client makes the DAM system successful, not the software company or integrator – we can only make it fail.

Why systems fail at the client is no mystery at all. Change. You take a group of people – for example the ones most affected by the introduction of DAM to their environment – content creators. They have their files all over the place but they basically know where to find them. They are always creating new places when they need to. But like my dad, an engineer by trade, he could thrust his hand into an apparent stack of recycling and pull out the relevant article to his point at hand. Creatives can do this quite well. The problems is, they are only part of the entire process. These assets get touched by up to 10 or more roles during the creation process (legal, approval, CSR, suppliers, project managers…) and most of these people need to find the assets and then they need to be changed and returned. After it is approved and final, it gets published to web, print, mobile and potential mail/POS/packaging. If you want to control your brand you need to control your assets and, you just can’t leave that hanging on my dad being able to pull it out of his stack. So, you have to tell all of these roles (including the creatives who favour folder names like :Direct Mail Piece for Mother Tucker’s Restaurant with the guy in red overalls standing out front) that what they done for the past n years is going to change. And even worse: they’ve been told this before. They had a DAM system and it didn’t work out at all so you better just sell your damn system somewhere else.

That’s the part that is depressing about DAM. The technology side keeps racing ahead and all the technology people can tell you how we can improve all sorts of things. Web technology alone is changing the face of integration with other systems – even old web services look passe. Integrators have all the technology tools to implement a good working system. It is building the excitement for the clients which will make it work. This is a great part of the success of SaaS or so-called cloud solutions. It already exists so the client really already knows it is completely up to them to make it work. The opportunity to blame the implementation team has passed as soon as the sale is made. SaaS isn’t a one size fits all so many companies either have to implement in-house, or it just makes more sense. If you have to integrate your DAM with ECM, ERP or PIM, you really need to have a lot figured out and blessed by lawyers before you commit to anything externally hosted.

There are many different schools of thought on DRM. Publishers and content creators tend to fall on the more severe side of it. Many are proponents of digital locking and are fairly relentless in pursuit of compensation for any type of use. Some are much more similar in stance to the shareware community where they don’t want to stifle access but would like to be compensated for their property that others find useful. There are also those who support free and easy access to all content regardless of the creator.

I think content usefulness and proliferation are directly proportional – as one increases, so does the other. However, I also find quality and compensation are often inversely proportional – the cheaper the content, the lower the quality and therefore the value. From an internet perspective, I feel the need to define content whose rights are worth discussing. This will be contentious I’m sure but for the purposes of the discussion of rights management, I think it is appropriate to make a distinction. Chats and many posts or blogs, as well as many videos are consumed so quickly and the value so compressed that there is very little concern about the rights and corresponding compensation. This is both from the originator and consumer standpoint. The video of the nut cracking skateboard spill is usually posted in poor quality for free with no expectation of compensation and the gratification is simply the number of hits it gets. Similarly it is usually watched once and quickly and soon fades from consciousness.

Content requiring more substantial time, effort and investment deserves consideration with respect to rights and return on investment. There is a practical side to all of this though. Many bands have found that releasing their music for free on their website will generate more interest in a shorter period of time and reach more people that traditional channels for releasing music. There is a significant resistance to this because it has a negative impact on a large business segment that has developed a channel, which, when it was the only channel, generated controlled amounts of income but to possibly reduced markets and possibly rewarding too many people who had little to do with the creation of that content.

This causes one to question what role DRM has in the music industry. Is it actually better for the artist to manage the process on their own or do the music industry people actually provide better value? If both provide some value, should the music industry be focusing more on areas where they actually provide the value – possibly organizing and planning tours and similar activities where an individual might have difficulty raising the capital to support such endeavours.

I don’t have the answers to efficiency and effectiveness of the different methods of content delivery but I’m pretty sure that the web as a channel is very accessible to individual artists and that the model of handling content should definitely change to utilize the value the web provides. When this happens – business realizes that  the cat is out of the bag and they need to rethink their value proposition – DRM will change for good and for the better. It really comes down to good business which is to offer a good value proposition. When this happens, content won’t need to be locked or protected nearly as tightly as today.

Certainly, it is in the best interest of consumers for the individuals and companies offering content to sell the rights to the content and not the media. If I purchased a VHS 20 years ago of the first Star Wars trilogy, I should be able to download that for free today. I have paid my royalties and should not have to do so again. Similarly, If I own the Led Zeppelin library on vinyl, I should be able to download and listen to it freely today. Instead of investing in restrictive technology they should be investing in proliferation technology. The adoption rate on a single lifetime right-to-use of content would be much higher then on specific media which will inevitably be obsolete. This is also much greener as it leaves it up to the individual to decide whether they ever even need media. They could just keep their content on whatever digital device the use and be assured they would have a legal right to it moving forward. Less packaging, less waste. Less industry but we certainly shouldn’t be propping up industries that are certainly on their way out anyway. This is a great idea for a business which, having written about it, I now own it and copyright it (unless I am late of course).

Over there years there has been some discussion about valuing digital assets and registering them on the balance sheet like physical assets. Michael Moon discussed this as a sort of holy grail for DAM a number of years back. He posits that the weakest purchase motivator for systems is cost reduction and the strongest is an increase to the balance sheet with anything generating revenues a close second.

I read a blog of Jeremy Wilker’s on hidden costs of DAM and noticed a comment posted by Kristin Maija Peterson where she asked the question “What would it do to an organization’s balance sheet if their digital assets were insured by a third party? Would it increase the value of their digital assets, thereby increasing the value of the organization?”

This is a very interesting consideration for anyone who creates, sells or uses DAM. Certainly these digital assets have value. They have a fully burdened cost. They usually have some internal value whether past, current and future use. They potentially have a market value. Even from a common sense perspective, if you have decided to keep it, it must have some value (consideration of hoarding aside).

I recall that there were consideration to make allowances for this to GAAP that would easily allow companies rocognize digital assets on the balance sheet. In 2003, CIOinsight interviewed Michael Moon who had this to say:

• “Any digital object that follows generally accepted accounting practice for asset recognition. So if you have any kind of digital object that you can show that you have reused for a period of greater than 18 months; have captured the development expenses associated with that particular object; and can directly link the reuse of that object to a discrete sale for a revenue event or a discrete cost savings; and have taken prudent measures to protect this asset, then generally accepted accounting practices will support you recognizing that as a financial asset on the balance sheet.”

Needless to say, a system would have to follow some accepted guidelines for tracking a digital asset to be able to capitalize it on the balance sheet. This is where DAM systems would shine but I haven’t really herard a lot lately about companies valuing their assets to enrich their balance sheet. I’m sure there could be concerns about a company like say, CBS or Time-Warner, suddenly appreciating in value by several billion because of a recalculation on digital file value. In many cases this would be entirely valid. For example, if LucasFilm had the Star Wars franchise, when they released the more recent trilogy of movies, every asset associated with the previous three would undoubtedly increase in value. However, if shareholders didn’t believe this value was real, they would start selling the stock which would actually drive down the market value of the company.

I’m getting into areas too complicated for me to speak cogently on but I am still interested in the valuation and capitalization of digital assets. After all this discussion, there is much I still don’t know:

• Are companies doing it and to what degree i.e. just high quality images or are they valuing PowerPoint docs at any significant value?
• What are the guidelines for valuation?
• For companies that have done this, what has been teh market reaction to increasing asset value (you would think it would be positive but there is an element of trust here)?
• Are most current DAM offerings sufficiently tracking assets to allow for easy valuation?

There is very little information – let alone first hand – on this subject so anyone aware of anyone doing this, please comment or make some information available.

We have done many DAM implementations at our company and most succeed. We have also helped a number of clients with dormant or crippled DAM systems bring them back to life. What makes a DAM system succeed? In a word, preparation.

There are a number of reasons for DAM systems to fail: no upper level commitment; no front line commitment; no training; never installed; improperly installed. These usually lead to premature abandonment. Thus the primary reason for failure of a DAM system is lack of preparation.

Pre-purchase
We have a document that we usually give out at the start of our DAM exploration with clients early in the sales cycle. It is called the 6 Mistakes commonly made in choosing a DAM solution and how to avoid them all! Those 6 mistakes are:

1. It takes forever to find a solution and then you’re still uncertain what to get.
2. You don’t get proof it works.
3. It takes a lifetime to get installed and never gets completed.
4. Being oversold or undersold.
5. Overlooking or underestimating the need for ongoing support.
6. Making a purchase decision before you’ve confirmed the stability of the manufacturer.

The key to avoiding all of these is preparation. You should know why you need it and how you can benefit from it, what features you need, what work flow you will use and who the stakeholders are. Most of these steps can be accomplished before you even engage vendors and doing so will avoid most of the 6 mistakes. For example:

• Having an upper management stakeholder yields a budget which helps avoid being over and undersold and allows you to seriously approach vendors.
• Engaging front line stakeholders will yield a set of features and requirements for your solution which also avoid over and under selling and also makes it quicker to select your solution and evaluate the features the vendor shows (proof).
• Evaluating potential vendors via web resources shortens the time to find candidates and determine how solid a company they are.

Knowing these common mistakes allows you to address them during vendor engagement. This ensures that you get assurances that you are dealing with the right manufacturer and integrator and that you have the right solution and support package in place. Proper planning assures that you meet your timelines and start achieving ROI on the schedule you intended.

Pre-install
Once you have chosen the solution, you still have to manage the process of installation and handover. This is key because at some point, your vendor and integrator will go away and you will be responsible for running the system on a day-to-day basis. You must make sure you are ready for this.

We have a suite of service products specifically designed to get us out of the account as soon as possible and leave a fully functioning solution with a client ready to administer and use the system. These are installation, training, consulting and support products that have proven very successful in getting the client up and running as soon as we leave.

We offer user training, administrative training, support packages (the system comes with one year built in) and consulting. The critical step missed in most engagements is the time you spent before you start implementing anything, where we discuss work flow, metadata, taxonomy and organizational practices for DAM systems. The first half introduces the options and most common practices we are aware of, including: taxonomy standards, metadata and work flow with an eye to the client’s use. In this session, we encourage the client to discuss this and then discuss further internally over the next few days before the second half of the session. The second half is ideally a session where we listen to what the client has decided and help them solidify this and discuss any potential opportunities or pitfalls. We also know a number of specialists who focus almost solely on metadata whom we refer them to for more specialized help. Some DAM users actually spend years developing metadata standards and work flows before they even start looking for a solution.

Proper training is essential to success and achieving your ROI with your DAM system. Only with training do you understand the capabilities and possibilities of your solution. This is the only way you can assume control of the solution and take it to new levels.

We have deployed many DAM systems for clients and these are used for many different purposes. They usually have some common facets to the systems like:

• They create content that they want to share.
• The content exists in multiple formats.
• They have information about the content (metadata) that they also want to share.
• They want to share the content over the web.
• They want to secure access to the content.

Our clients who deploy these systems are in a wide variety of industries: publishing, cosmetics, library/reference, museums, hospitals, manufacturing. They use the system to sell their digitall assets, to share sales and marketing collateral and to manage their brand collateral.

DAM systems are great at organizing a mess of files but there power can be extended to many other key systems throughout your organization. A natural fit is to integrate it with your CMS system for web publishing where the CMS manages the publishing process and the DAM serves up the assets like images and text. Add e-commerce to the CMS and you can have all the data related to a product available to the client at time of purchase. There are some great opportunities to improve your customer service too by making product collateral like manuals etc. available to clients over the web.

While these system integration exercises will yield some great benefits, they are the more obvious opportunities but there are other systems that can benefit from integration with DAM as well, some of which aren’t so obvious. Integration with a PIM System (product information management system) can merge the physical and promotional aspects of a product with the sizing, pricing and costing data. Integration with an ERP system can provide much of the same benefits as a PIM with added benefits of showing inventory levels and logistic data.

The benefits to these integrations are significant. So, why aren’t they done more often? The long standing issues surrounding any system integration initiative are no different when integrating DAM. There is only one right way to do do it and that involves normalizing all data to avoid duplication of data. Duplication is a common weakness of many integration projects because it undermines the benefits. Users lose faith in the system when:

• They access data that is out of date.
• They update data only to find that different data appears in other systems.
• They update data only to find that it never makes it into other systems.

Consequently, DAM is often deployed as an island. The issue here though is the same same: duplication. Unless everyone knows that the DAM system is the authoritative source to the data and they have access to it, they end up with a copy when they need it. The source can change in the mean time and the copy is then outdated. Regardless, the copy is usually reused relentlessly. This creates some significant branding issues for companies when the wrong message gets out.

Every integration project should be committed to doing it right. Otherwise they never deliver the results intended. This means you must examine the data first and do everything possible to have a single authority for all data. Once you do this, the project is really about turning the authoritative source into a service everyone can use.

I recently read an article on VTLs that stated that the killer app for this technology could be something they called “Data de-duplication”. They appeared to assume savings from not backing up the same file twice. While this is totally valid within the realm of vitualized tape libraries, it misses the main benefits of de-duplication.

Organizations are rife with files stored in multiple places. E-mails are even worse but at least most e-mails sent out to huge lists of people are relatively small in average size. Files are typically large enough to make an impact in your storage costs. Furthermore, most files that get proliferated are ones that are read and not altered like Powerpoint presentations and PDFs.

The duplicate file problem is one that should already be solved in most oranizations, by using a system to manage files. The most prevalent systems available to do this are DAM sysstems and document management systems. They store files and associated data (metadata) in a database which can be searched. These systems can also ensure a single existence of each file and control access to files. Some systems also have workflow features to control approval and flow of documents.

Using these systems to minimize duplication will solve the problem at the earliest possible stage in the document’s life cycle. This will eliminate the benefit and therefore necessity of building these features into a backup system. A backup system should remain totally focused on backing up all data on volumes in the backup set. If a backup system is allowed to choose what to backup based on criteria, it opens the door for it to compromise itself with those choices.