Digital. Asset. Management. So what?
- PDF / 59,385 Bytes
- 3 Pages / 609 x 791 pts Page_size
- 32 Downloads / 221 Views
Keywords: digital, asset, management, intangible, financial Abstract Digital asset management, often abbreviated as DAM, is a rapidly emerging field where many different disciplines meet for the delivery, who along with a plethora of buyers with diverse needs are trying to make sense of exactly what DAM means, what it does and why it is good. This paper looks at some of the parts that make up the whole; what it means being ‘‘digital’’; what an ‘‘asset’’ is; and what ‘‘management’’ may involve.
INTRODUCTION
Niclas Ljungberg IconZest Ltd, London, UK Tel: +44 (0) 77889 20731 Email: [email protected]
Digital asset management. Digital. Asset. Management. DAM. With the launch of its own journal this seems a good opportunity to take one of those infamous steps back and think a bit about what we actually mean when we use these words. They may be crystal clear to everyone within a tightly knit DAM community (if indeed there is such a thing), who share a concise and undisputed notion of what DAM denotes. Somehow I doubt it though. Among other things, I chair the Intellectual Capital Network in the UK, and whenever people get together to discuss things like ‘‘knowledge’’, which has been around as a concept for a while and should thus be likely to be defined and agreed, groups can and will spend endless and rather passionate sessions arguing about what ‘‘it’’ is, why it is useful, for whom, and so on. The purpose of this short piece is not to provide the final analysis or come up with the definitive definition. Rather, it is to remind ourselves that words are complex beings, and concepts conceived from no fewer than three words may, or may not, be easily understood by all, or mean the same thing across different contexts. As digital asset management is an expanding area, we need to exercise care when preaching its virtues to the world, be clear about the underlying principles, and keep asking ourselves those stretching questions. All we need to do is to ask ourselves the questions any typical ten-year-old would ask before going to school on a rainy morning. What does it all mean? Why do we bother?
For instance, take the plethora of associated acronyms that swamp the field of DAM. To name but a few: BRM, BIM, CMS, CRM, ECM, EMM, ERP, ILM, MAM, MOM, MRM, PDF, SCM, XML. Enough to make any CEO, CFO, CIO, CMO or CTO scratch their heads in mission critical bewilderment. Although a slight amount of jargon is bound to haunt any field related to technology these days, the important thing is not to hide behind it but to explain in clear and straightforward English (or whatever your local language is) what we are talking about. Sound simple? Try it. Borrowing freely from the world of biological taxonomists, I have been told there are basically two kinds of people in this world, lumpers and splitters. The lumpers tend to generalize, look at similarities and group things into higher orders; the splitters like to look at specific details and differences to break things down further. It can be an interesting exercise to figure out what kind of perso
Data Loading...
