Digital Asset Management (DAM) Has Evolved – Have You Kept Up?

Traditionally, the need for DAM has been rooted in the idea that your content needed to be:

• Stored in a single location providing a single source of truth
• Secure so that the right people, have the right access, to the right assets, at the right time
• Tagged with metadata so the content had meaning and context
• Transformed to the formats required by the users and systems that consume it
• Discoverable by the people who need it in an easy and efficient manner  

Many have used DAM to move past the days of storing their digital assets in disparate locations such as personal computers, external drives, ftp sites, online storage sites, and file systems. That was inefficient and ultimately very costly. Repurposing any asset was nearly non-existent and finding any content, not to mention the correct version, was like a daily treasure hunt. DAM has certainly solved these typical storage, search, and retrieval problems.

As the remote workforce has grown considerably in the past years, DAM has evolved well beyond the traditional use cases.  It provides the ability to share, collaborate, and deliver all types of digital assets to geographically dispersed individuals and teams. Additionally, it facilitates and provides auditability to know what was done to an asset by whom and when. DAM is now a critical component of workstreams across a wide variety of functional areas and industries.

Businesses have realized the importance of DAM and adoption is on the rise. It has become a critical business application and an integral piece of the marketing technology ecosystem. It can no longer exist as a standalone solution but serves as an application that enhances data driven applications like Master Data Management (MDM) or Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), further enables content operations such as Product Information Management (PIM) or Content Marketing Platform (CMP), and drives content to Digital Experience platforms all while tracking when and where the content is being used.

No matter where you are on your journey to more effectively organize, store, and distribute your content, a DAM strategy is imperative.

Interested in learning more about the basics of DAM? Check out our other article “What is DAM? And other questions about digital asset management, answered”.