Digital asset management
What is digital asset management?
“Digital assets” is the term given to digital content, which is any content intended for digital use, and owned by an organization or individual.
Digital assets are binary in form and can only be accessed by electronical means. As a result, they require a storage system in order to be located and used. Digital asset management, often referred to as DAM, is the name given to these storage systems, as digital asset management offers a location where these digital assets are stored, organized and accessed.
Content digital assets commonly used by organizations and hosted in digital asset management solutions include:
- Documents.
- Images, including logos.
- Videos.
- Audio.
Importance
Challenges
Solution
Importance
Why is digital asset management important?
Digital transformation has meant that workplaces are increasingly digital. Images and templates are now created, used and stored mostly online. The methods for storage are varied, from using an intranet to hosting on desktops. As these digital assets are vital for every day tasks, the place where they are stored must be accessible, and the way in which they are stored must make sense.
If an employee is unable to find a logo which they need for a document, it can take vital time away from their workday to try and find this logo, and this can be extended on a wider scale across the entire organization, meaning that inadequate digital asset management can waste an organization a significant amount of time, and cost a significant amount of money.
Challenges
What are the challenges of digital asset management?
Digital asset management is challenging, because digital assets must be accessible. When an enterprise consists of thousands of employees across multiple office locations and countries, it is difficult to ensure that employees can access assets. For example, if digital assets are only stored in desktop locations, this can cause difficulties for an employee trying to work from a mobile device on their commute.
Another difficulty is the need to ensure the DAM aligns with employees’ workflows. If this is not the case, employees will instead take the quickest route to find an asset, which can mean copying the asset from a previously used document. This causes issues as the asset could be off-brand in the wrong form or size, or be an outdated version. These inconsistencies reflect badly on the organization.
Solution
How can software help digital asset management?
Digital asset management software, which is a type of content management, is vital for successful digital asset management. There are multiple types of digital asset management solutions available, which all provide a place to store digital assets, in an organized manner, and where the metadata related to the asset is also available.
Digital asset management systems allow easy access to assets, and also provide a central location where assets can be updated easily and be stored securely. Through digital asset management systems, employees can be sure that they will always have access to the correct digital assets, ensuring best-quality content is produced.
Templafy integrations
Templafy and digital asset management
Although digital asset management systems provide access to assets that are needed, the issue remains that they must be easily accessible from employee’s everyday workflows in order to optimize usage. Templafy integrates with DAM systems directly from Office applications, or wherever your organization works. Templafy integrates with common DAM systems such as Brandworkz, Bynder and Brandfolder, stock image and icon banks such as Pexels and Iconfinder, and also allows integration to be set up with the digital asset management system that your organization is currently using.
Alongside bringing digital assets into every day workflows, Templafy also provides a cloud-based template management system, and tools for accessing, building and checking documents, to aid productivity and governance. Templafy also offers integrations with more than just digital asset management systems, unifying document ecosystems through working with Office 365 and Google G suite, document management systems, CRMs, storage and security systems. This helps organizations to build and create business documents efficiently, for the benefit of the entire organization.
Extra resources
Take a look at our blog for more information about DAM systems.