Looking Ahead to 2014: Trends in Digital Asset Management and Metadata

by David Lipsey

 

I’m spending a lot of time in New York City these days, and this is the time of the year when all of the beautiful candy stores are filled with Valentine’s Day gifts. This got me to thinking—what would I like my Valentine to bring me in a box full of DAM treats?  Below—a few thoughts on this…..

Metadata becomes a household word:  This is the year when, with our passion for the critical role of “metadata”, we could finally see our beloved term achieve widespread recognition—and even appear in more newspaper headlines.   While the circumstances were a far cry from “watch how library science can enable great results on consumers finding your content or products, make social media and search deliver better results and help your internal staff reduce duplication and find assets more quickly”, NSA helped us to make the power of metadata No Secret Anymore!

Creating an anticipatory and adaptive framework for metadata:  As we have watched the need for product and content assets to “self-express” themselves and be discoverable through countless devices and channels, we’ve also learned that how we manage our terms of solicitation cannot rest on fixed fields of yesteryear.   To continue, we can make No Such Assumptions!  We look ahead to creating a much more dynamic set of structures of how, and when, metadata is assigned to assets.  We are tracking the ability of content creation tools and work flows to more dynamically inject assets with context sensitive meanings. We are also carefully tracking tools in semantic inference, crowdsourcing, and the real world challenges in finding the human capital through partners such as Amazon Turk in capturing the human aspect of meanings.

Content, content, everywear:  Along with the ever expanding quantity of devices—which we think of as the horn of plenty and the horn of anxiety—content now involves our wristwatches (how appropriate!) and in the not too far off future, eyeglasses. Beyond that, along with the kinesthetic reengineering of fabrics to achieve dialogue with our digital devices, the fabric itself will become expressive of imagery and text.  Anticipating the need to content-aware devices is a trend that content managers are working towards.  And managing this incessant percussive need for content transformations puts demands on the content experts—wherever they are located in an organization.   From the Nike wristband to Fitbit to on-demand exercises on my iPad, the ingenious use of purposeful content is rapidly evolving.  Related to this is a radical rise in the understanding that DAM can drive DIY materials, repair manuals, and should be tightly bound with all customer service operations—linking the CSR to product manuals, imagery, customer photos of broken products, etc.

“Honey, I shrunk the production cycle”:  Viewed more broadly, managing digital assets better continues to be measured by the nonstop need to compress both production and time to market cycles.   An engineer wants to see near-real time changes from an overseas design studio; no problem in many CAD workflow tools, but in today’s world of parallel production awareness, someone in packaging wants to see the same new design on the packaging mock-up and the digital marketing team has the same request for the social media campaign. And via mobile, if you please?   The ability—or at least the need—of digital asset management to facilitate these parallel workflow and calendaring streams will grow exponentially in the coming year.  Assets, with the correct privileges and rights sanctuary around them, can no longer stay trapped in their traditional work flow systems—access to DAM as core service will take on more and more centrality for business operations, from concept to distribution.  At the same time, we recognize that our ability to better accomplish the workflows vital to asset fulfillment in both end state manufacture-on-demand and mass personalization (e.g., Zazzle, Vista Print, etc.) has gotten significantly better.

Power to the (content) people:  One of the greatest areas of change we’ll watch in the coming year is where DAM and content control is organizationally located.  It’s essential to track two trends here.  First, watching the centralization of enterprise DAM and the recognition that great metadata and taxonomy work has no single master in DAM, web CMS, document repositories, or any other sole source of content management.   DAM will increasingly seem out of place in the marketing—or any other singularly defined—department.  Central DAM (and allied metadata services) is as core to today’s enterprise as centralized payroll and a well-functioning ERP system from SAP or Oracle.

Second, the central role of decentralized content stewardship should be recognized.  At one time, a handful of power users who knew the ins and outs of asset uploading were thought to be the primary users in a DAM system.  Today, we need to recognize the role of the departmentally based (or sourced from IT or Operations) content steward who can position the vitality of content assets and work flow to everyday operations as well as next year’s strategic plan.  Attending to the job description, organizational placement, incentive program and community exchange between and among content stewards will be trending this year.

Measure twice, or three, or four times, cut once:  And forget the cut part!   One of the most important trend lines is an increasingly sophisticated answer to the question of “how are we doing”.  Reporting about DAM must evolve past the interesting, but simplistic, ideas of how many assets ingested and downloaded.  We’ll be working on projects to help tie our DAM systems to SAP or Oracle; our understanding of the value of assets will deepen as we both measure and work towards better visualization of asset patterns.  From this, we’ll engage in deeper conversations about return on investment, as well as more vibrant reporting to upper management and project sponsors about the business valuations of DAM.  We also expect to see better communication from the content stewards and DAM managers back to original project sponsors, who often get forgotten as DAM matures and diversifies over time.

Beam me up—or down, Scotty—3 D printing:  DAM has the potential to play a significant role in securing the market and/or economic meaning of 3D printing.  The increasing use and remarkable spread of 3D printers rings with both business risk and business opportunity. Companies can play both sides of the production cycle with 3D printing—product manufacturers can provide the 3D instructional file to make, for example, a customized model toy car or repair part.  Equally feasible, a company can receive and relicense instructional files.  In either of these bi-directional workflows, marketing materials, imagery and the file itself can all be seen as assets.  And they’ll need to be managed.

78, 45, 33 and beyond:  Records management and DAM:  The explosion of managed content is concurrently creating a secondary set of issues in records management.  As the cost, reach and frequency of e-discovery increase, the need for discovery-centric metadata is a trend worth watching.  The exponential growth of digital assets also creates policy issues for archiving and disposal; other issues arise for accurately tracking the location of massive asset stores as they move to the cloud and cloud storage vendors go out of business or change ownership.  An area we are watching is using the “metadata-only” management behaviors of DAM to track asset location independent of the actual asset location.  We’re also closely monitoring the role of Records Information Management Stewards to see if and how this role matches up to content stewards.

I’ll keep looking for the candy box of my DAM wishes—and if any of you know where these DAM treasures are wrapped up, send me a note and share!  And, both here at Optimity and at the DAM meetings we attend around the world, we’ll help you to unwrap the meaning of DAM throughout the year.

 

David Lipsey is a Partner at Optimity Advisors and Chairman of the global conferences onThe Art and Practice of Managing Digital Media and The International DAM Foundation.