Press & Events

No Longer A Pain In The Asset

Digital Asset-Management Tools Let Companies Manage
Unstructured Data.
By Tony Kontzer

September 9, 2002 - InformationWeek - In recent years, U.S. companies have created an onslaught of digital content that's 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 centralized 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 digitized and stored, can be redistributed over the Internet. But while that business model has stalled amid squabbles over digital rights and 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: These assets often are stored in remote locations throughout a company network, sometimes even on individual employees' desktops, making them inaccessible to the rest of the company. That means they're also frequently duplicated unnecessarily as employees re-create 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 those problems by storing all digital files in a searchable, centralized repository accessible through a Web interface. Thus, if a marketing manager in Helsinki, Finland, needs to put together a product data sheet for customers in his region, he can see if 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, as much of 80% 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 CIOs," says Giga Information Group analyst Bob Markham, noting that this figure represents a major shift over the last few years. "They're realizing they need to treat content the same way they treat data."

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

The bottom line: 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 for much longer.

And that's not all, Markham says. 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 industry, which is using digital asset management to tie together the various elements of property listings, from photos and title documents to contracts and contingency agreements.

The value of linking related assets can't be underestimated, says Sebastian Holst, VP of marketing for digital asset-management vendor Artesia Technologies Inc., since 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 says. "You have paper."

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

"We had tremendous resources that were very underutilized because people couldn't access them easily," says Phil Mooney, director of the $20 billion beverage maker's archives department. 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 yet, 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 a database and a customized search tool. Soon after that 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, everything 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, the company chose IBM's Content Manager software, not only because it appeared capable of helping the soft-drink maker achieve its objectives, but also because Coca-Cola was a happy user of IBM's Lotus Notes messaging and collaboration software, and it 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," Mooney says, and he didn't want to take that chance again.

After a deployment effort that occupied a five-person team for more than a year, Coca-Cola in October launched a digital archive that continues to be populated with more than a century's worth of materials. So far, the system contains about 10,000 still images, 8,500 documents, and 5,000 videos. Mooney hopes to double those numbers by year's end. "We're still in the toddler stage," he says. "We're trying to catch up."

Mooney says the investment in the system has been "bigger than a bread box," but is 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 half.

Simon & Schuster Inc. also has seen an enthusiastic response to its new digital asset-management system, which is a work in progress. The effort goes back to 1999, when Steve Kotrch, director of publishing technologies at the $650 million publishing arm of Viacom Inc., 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 CIO 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, catalogs, 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 total data stored reached 1.5 tera-bytes. Another one-half terabyte 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 that were 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 also say it will increase the workload of the IT staff going forward, because the staff will be expected to maintain the functionality. The flip side is that it should result in fewer storage and bandwidth concerns.

"It makes us sleep better at night knowing that all this stuff is secure," Mander says. 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 one-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 repurposing content for consumers. Those efforts have stalled, and now such companies are turning their attention to internal deployments.

Two years after it enlisted Sonic Foundry Inc. to build a mock digital-asset management system, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. is finally zeroing in on a vendor to help it develop a digital asset-management system. During the past several weeks, a field of 30 contenders has been whittled down to three (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, says Gray Ainsworth, senior VP of technical services.

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. "Different departments usually go out and do their own thing and thus create the same thing over and over again," Ainsworth says. "We want a companywide solution."

The first task facing 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 bios, and publicity photos. Eventually, film clips will be added.

Once it's in place, he says, the system will yield huge time-savings by making it possible to access content electronically and manipulate it digitally. 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 copy machines or burn CD-ROMs, and the studio will become more efficient in developing marketing campaigns and licensing its content, Ainsworth says.

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 says, it would take days for attorneys to view the clip, review the credits and 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. "Voilà," Ainsworth says. "Instant settlement."

Ainsworth hopes that once the bandwidth and rights issues have been overcome, the digital asset-management system will grow into an electronic media distribution tool. That represents the Holy Grail for the entertainment business and the realization of digital asset management's early promise, 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 realize just as much long-term value from digital asset management as their counterparts in the movie industry, he says.

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