What are your organisation’s Digital Assets and why are they so important to your business’s digital strategy?

If you were to take a moment and think about how many different places that digital assets can exist within your organisation, it’s easy to see that there are risks and opportunities for how they are managed.

As businesses increasingly focus on interaction with their customers in a digital world, your organisation’s ability to organise, manage, use and re-use digital assets is taking on increasing importance due to the volume, complexity and fragmentation of those assets across different storage places and devices. But what is a ‘digital asset’ and why are they now so important to an organisations on-going digital strategy?

Digital Assets – What are They?

Digital assets include the multitude of electronic files that a business may develop, acquire or buy, for example:

  • Product images
  • Photographs
  • Video files
  • Audio files
  • Presentations
  • Logos, design files and other brand assets

These digital assets have the potential to be used and reused within your business and would cost time, money and energy to replace or re-create if lost, corrupted or inaccessible.

Take a moment to think about how many different places digital asses might exist in your organisation: network drives, local computer hard drives, memory sticks, cloud drives (personal and business), mobile devices and so on. Then imagine how hard it would be to identify and access them when you don’t really know what lives where.

Digital Asset Management Requires a DAM Strategy

Digital Asset Management (DAM) is important for two simple reasons: time and money. Right now, more than ever before, marketing is driving a real-time customer experience underpinned by the use of digital assets.

Marketing departments are being given increased budgets to spend directly on digital marketing, resulting in a significant increase in the creation and use of these assets. As time-to-market rates drop rapidly, the ability to leverage digital assets efficiently is becoming a critical business enabler.

Those businesses that cannot readily identify and manage their digital assets will struggle to compete against those that can.

Digital Asset Management (DAM) provides the tools and techniques that manage the ingestion, annotation, cataloguing, storage, retrieval and distribution of your digital assets, which substantially improves your marketing team’s ability to maximise and leverage on a recurring basis. When done effectively, digital assets can be stored, identified and accessed quickly ensuring the greatest return for the business rather than re-inventing the wheel.

Furthermore, where some of your digital assets are licenced from a third party, DAM provides a structured approach to ensuring the digital rights obligations attached to those assets are appropriately and accurately fulfilled, preventing any unexpected surprises later on.

The Critical Issue in Digital Asset Management

The major issue with many businesses today is that they have no DAM strategy. Digital assets have been acquired or created without any coordinated approach resulting in an inability to identify what they are, where they are and how to use them effectively.

In fact, in many cases, there is actually no comprehension of what digital assets are and the role they play for an organisation.

This is highly inefficient and will eventually erode the business’s competitiveness where speed and turnaround is of high value. Hunting for assets or recreating them is a hugely inefficient and costly exercise. The lack of a standardised approach can also lead to version control (quality) and third party licencing (liability) issues, not to mention the cost of storing duplicated assets.

Discovering Your Digital Assets

The first step in managing digital assets is to understand exactly what digital assets your organisation has.

Undertaking a structured review to identify the type and location of your digital assets and then cataloguing them allows you to see the type, volume and locations of what you have.

The next step is to build a DAM strategy that details the manner in which:

  • Digital assets are created (or acquired)
  • How and where they will be stored, how they will be identified,
  • How they can be searched for and retrieved and
  • Any policies that apply to them (e.g. third party rights, version control etc.).

Once you have your strategy, a Gap Analysis between current and desired state should be undertaken and a plan built to address the gaps. In many cases leveraging a Digital Asset Management Software (DAMS) product might form a part of the desired state.

DAMS come pre-built with the ability to apply business logic and often a high degree of automation as to how assets are ingested, centrally stored, described, retrieved and with policies to govern them (often workflow capabilities are a key enabler for this).

The next step is to execute your plan and transform your organisation to ensure that Digital Asset Management is a competitive advantage – not a disadvantage.

Let Us Help You Regain Control of Your Digital

If you have lost control of your digital profile or it is underutilised, Quay Consulting can help bring some order and sanity back. We have extensive experience working in media, developing suitable processes and engaging highly experienced consultants with deep experience in the digital asset domain.

Quay can work with your team to undertake a structured approach to digital asset identification, build a Digital Asset Management Strategy (including business and IT architecture and product evaluation) and help deliver a digital outcome that keeps your organisation ahead of the competition.

Contact us on 02 9098 6300 to discuss your position with our digital asset experts.

We believe that quality thought leadership is worth sharing and encourage you to share with your colleagues. If you’re interested in republishing our content, here’s what’s okay and what’s not okay.

To speak to our team about how we can help your business deliver better projects, please contact us.

About Quay

Quay Consulting
Quay Consulting is a professional services business specialising in the project landscape, transforming strategy into fit-for-purpose delivery. Meet our team ...