Digital Asset Management System: Management Of Digital Media

The invention of computers has occurred in the later part of the industrialization. However, the popularity of computers with the public have started in early 1980s with the advent of personal computers and since then has multiplied its usage manifold. The results of the industrialization are high quality work, reduction in cycle time, faster and timely execution, minimum human effort etc. Computers contributed their might in every field of life and played an important role in the growth and development of companies and their businesses.

The computers basically consist of a hardware and software. One can compare a human body to hardware and human brain to software. Both the hardware and software have to coexist for effective operation. Software programs can be either standard or specialized. Examples of specialized software are software designed for specific industrial applications such as automotive, auditing, media, production planning and control, inventory management etc.

Digital asset management systems fall under this category of specialized software. Digital Asset Management (DAM) consists of tasks and decisions surrounding ingesting, annotating, cataloguing, storage and retrieval of digital assets, such as digital photographs, animations, videos and music. Digital asset management systems help the users to manage all the visually rich files in a proper manner.

Many businesses and organizations are required to manage digital assets such as image, video, audio and other media assets for their day to day use. The management of such assets has its own challenges because the procedure for acquisition, storage and retrieval of a large volume of these assets requires proper streamlining. Such assets are mainly used in media related organizations such as newspaper and magazines, Television production, radio, advertising agencies etc. on everyday and every hour and in these industries time factor is very critical. These are also used in places such as marketing companies, factories, photo studios, BPO’S etc. Effective implementation of a DAM system will ensure reduction in production time and cost of content production and this maximizes the return on investment (ROI) from media assets.

One of the main requirements in any company is tracking the assets of the company. This in effect means that the management requires knowing at any point of time the assets owned by the company, value of these assets, date of purchase of these assets, asset condition and maintenance information etc. The Digital asset management systems are used for this purpose which will enable the company to conduct its operations smoothly. The DAM is getting popular among the various sections of the industries because of the facilities available for storing employee photographs, video clips from CCTV etc. which can be used anytime later as and when required.

The DAM facilitates optimum use of the available assets in the company in a consistent way. These are business tools which improves quality of the product and reduces time and cost. This in turn will improve the productivity.

Digital management systems can be categorized as per the following:

	Brand asset management system which focuses on facilitating content re-use within the organizations.
	Library asset management system which focuses on storage and retrieval of large amounts of media assets such as video or photo archiving.
	Production asset management system which focuses on storage, organization and revision control of digital assets.
	Digital supply chain services which pushes digital content out to digital retailers.

These are useful in restricting any copyright breach.