In recent years, companies have created an onslaught of digital content which is challenging bandwidth and storage capacities, as employees shoot documents and multimedia files back and forth at a dizzying pace.

Meanwhile, those same employees spend hours searching for the content scattered throughout their companies.

Enter digital asset management software, which essentially acts as a centralised digital library from which everything, from training videos and product photos to presentations and white papers, can be easily accessed and used.

Digital asset management tools were initially aimed at media and entertainment companies looking for a way to get a handle on feature films, television shows, trailers, music files and other so-called 'rich' media which, once digitised and stored, can be redistributed over the internet.

But while that business model has stalled amid squabbles over digital rights and the slower than expected growth of consumer broadband internet access, IT departments are being asked to deliver internal access to digital media.

The volume of digital assets is expanding too fast for many companies to manage. The result is that these assets are often stored in remote locations throughout a company network, sometimes even on individual employees' desktops, making them inaccessible to the rest of the company.

It means that they're also frequently duplicated unnecessarily, as employees recreate content that already exists but which they can't find.

Aside from lost productivity, the practice leads to inefficient storage and bandwidth-draining file transfers. Digital asset management systems solve these problems by storing all digital files in a searchable, centralised repository, accessible through a web interface.

So, if a marketing manager needs to put together a product data sheet for customers in his region, he can see whether anyone else in the company, anywhere else in the world, has already made such a document before creating his own.

According to a variety of vendors and research firms, up to 80 per cent of the information that now resides within most companies is unstructured content such as Word documents, HTML pages, video files and photos.

"That's what's getting the attention of chief information officers," according to Giga Information Group analyst Bob Markham.

He noted that this figure represents a major shift over the past few years. "They're realising that they need to treat content in the same way that they treat data," he explained.

Collaborative technologies
The growing use of collaborative technologies is also driving the issue, because such practices place a premium on having the relevant materials at employees' fingertips. "Any content that's not available can hinder a project," said Markham.

The bottom line is that companies need web-based applications that let employees search for a variety of content types that can be reused regardless of format. The ad hoc systems that have developed in many companies simply won't hack it much longer.

And that's not all, insisted Markham. Companies are using digital asset management in other ways, such as to open up new uses of content or to make employees' jobs easier by logically grouping related information.

He points to the real estate market, which is using digital asset management to bring together the various elements of property listings, from photos and title documents to contracts and contingency agreements.

The value of linking related assets cannot be underestimated, according to Sebastian Holst, vice president of marketing for US digital asset management vendor Artesia Technologies. Often, one piece of content is only worthwhile if it's attached to another.

"If you take a $10 bill and rip it in half, you don't have two fives," he pointed out. "You have paper."

It's the real thing
Coca-Cola offers a textbook case of the transforming power of digital asset management technology. Its 116 year-old brand is built as much on images, messages and marketing savvy as on its secret formula. But, as powerful as that imagery is, it was of little use to the company's sales and marketing teams around the globe.

"We had tremendous resources that were very under-used because people couldn't access them easily," explained Phil Mooney, the company's archives department director.

Instead, when someone wanted to reuse a classic poster or magazine ad, the image had to be shipped as an unwieldy printout or, more recently, on a CD-Rom. Worse still, if employees couldn't find what they were looking for, they would invest in creating an image that already existed somewhere else.

Five years ago, Coca-Cola began developing an online library for its still images. Because Mooney and his staff couldn't find a software product that would do what they wanted, they built their own database and a customised search tool.

Soon after the database was up and running, the scope of the project grew. Mooney wanted to deploy a registration system for logging items and creating reports on where the materials resided, whether in the database or in a museum halfway around the world.

Next, he wanted to address the variety of text documents the company produces, from press releases and speeches to policy statements. Then came discussions about videotaped commercials, co-sponsored promotional films, presentations and other moving images.

To take the next step, Coca-Cola chose IBM's Content Manager software, not only because it appeared capable of helping the company achieve its objectives, but because Coca-Cola was a happy user of IBM's Lotus Notes messaging and collaboration software.

It also had questions about the long-term viability of smaller players such as Excalibur Technologies (which has since merged with Intel's media division to form Convera), Bulldog (subsequently acquired by document management vendor Documentum), and Artesia. "I had been burned earlier on a smaller project," said Mooney.

After a deployment effort that occupied a team of five for more than a year, Coca-Cola launched a digital archive last October, populated with more than a century's worth of material.

So far, the system contains about 10,000 still images, 8,500 documents and 5,000 videos. Mooney hopes to double those numbers by the end of the year. "We're still at the toddler stage. We're trying to catch up," he explained.

Worthwhile investment
Mooney indicated that the investment has been well worth the cost. In less than a year, more than 5,000 out of 30,000 potential users have registered for the system, a percentage he describes as "amazing".

For those users, digital asset searches have shrunk from days to minutes, while the time it takes to develop marketing campaigns has been cut by as much as a half.

Simon & Schuster has also seen an enthusiastic response to its digital asset management system, which is a work in progress.

The story goes back to 1999, when Steve Kotrch, director of publishing technologies at the publishing arm of Viacom, brought in an archivist to create a file system to store the company's library of completed book manuscripts and associated covers. Before that, Kotrch says, content was stored all over the place "or not at all".

With the manuscript archive in place, Kotrch and chief information officer Anne Mander turned to Artesia to begin a digital asset management deployment in earnest.

In July 2001, the vendor debuted a system that provided web-based access to author photos, tip sheets, catalogues and cover art. During the subsequent months, additional assets such as newly completed manuscripts, movie trailers for films of books published by Simon & Schuster, posters and other advertising materials brought the number of asset types stored in the system to 40.

The data stored reached 1.5TB. Another 1.5TB will be added this year when the digital archive created in 1999 is added. Once that's done, all that will remain are the manuscripts and related images collected between the digital archive's creation in 1999 and the digital asset management system's debut two years later.

But Mander and Kotrch won't relax. They're both proud of the system and conscious of how necessary it was, but they say it will increase the workload of IT staff, who will be expected to maintain the functionality.

No more nightmares
The flipside is fewer storage and bandwidth concerns. "It makes us sleep better at night knowing that all this stuff is secure," said Mander.

Neither she nor Kotrch would reveal the amount of Simon & Schuster's investment in the system, but Kotrch says it was "worth the money". Two-thirds of the cost went to project management, building processes, and training employees on using the system, while the remaining third was spent on software and hardware.

Ironically, many entertainment companies, once the primary target of digital asset management vendors, have found themselves behind on such initiatives after establishing an initial focus on re-purposing content for consumers. Those efforts have stalled, and these companies are now turning their attention to internal deployments.

Two years after it enlisted Sonic Foundry to build a mock digital asset management system, Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) Studios is finally zeroing in on a vendor to help it develop a digital asset management system.

During the past weeks, a field of 30 contenders has been whittled down to three, but the studio wouldn't divulge the names of the finalists or whether Sonic Foundry is among them.

A final decision is expected sometime this month, said Gray Ainsworth, senior vice president of technical services at MGM.

Like Coca-Cola a few years back, MGM's decision to move ahead on its digital asset management project was necessitated by the ad hoc practices that were evolving throughout the company.

Company-wide solution
"Different departments usually go out and do their own thing and thus create the same thing over and over again," explained Ainsworth. "We want a company-wide solution."

The first task for the winning vendor is to develop what Ainsworth calls a "mother ship of a site" that will serve as an online document and image library filled with scripts, music cue sheets, staff biographies and publicity photos. Eventually, film clips will be added.

"Once it's in place, the system will yield huge time savings by making it possible to access content electronically and manipulate it digitally," said Ainsworth.

Promotional materials for films will be logically linked to related assets as diverse as soundtracks, rights information and sales histories.

Employees will no longer have to stand over photocopiers or burn CD-Roms, and the studio will become more efficient in developing marketing campaigns and licensing its content, according to Ainsworth.

Just about every department is likely to benefit. Consider a scenario in which MGM's legal department is working with an actor who says he feels pain from an injury suffered while performing a stunt in a film 10 years earlier.

Without a digital asset management system, Ainsworth said, it would take days for attorneys to view the clip, review the credits and the actor's agreement, then order the various elements from multiple locations.

With digital asset management, that same assortment of information could be accessed in minutes. "Voila. Instant settlement," said Ainsworth.

He hopes that, once the bandwidth and rights issues have been overcome, the digital asset management system will grow into an electronic media distribution tool.

This represents the Holy Grail for the entertainment business and the realisation of the early promise of digital asset management: namely meeting the public's demand to digitally consume media from home and via mobile devices while protecting the owners' rights and assets.

But companies not in the business of reselling their digital assets can realise just as much long-term value from digital asset management as their counterparts in the movie industry.

"Assets are assets," concluded Ainsworth. "To us, it means feature films and television. To Coca-Cola or Chase Manhattan it's something else. Companies just need to understand what their assets are, what information they need about those assets, and how those assets are used."

© 2002 CMP Media LLC.