For Position Only: A Modest Approach to Asset Management

Anita Dennis

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If all the tasks and technologies used in graphic design and production were viewed as a community, then digital asset management software would be the neighborhood braggart. Although it knows everyone on the street, it tends to boast about its value, so no one wants to listen to it anymore, much less play with it.

After all, we’ve been hearing about this niche technology for several years, and numerous so-called solutions are available, from shoebox-like applications for individuals, to tools for workgroups, to complex, enterprise-wide systems — seemingly something for everyone. Yet for all intents and purposes, no one is embracing the technology. Heck, there isn’t even an accepted acronym for this stuff: Is it DAM (digital asset management) or MAM (media asset management), or “brand resource management” (as one vendor calls it)? And although the “enterprise” is touted as the big market for this technology, vendors’ own numbers indicate they’ve penetrated only a fraction of Fortune 1000 companies. Something just isn’t clicking.

Left in the Blocks
I mean no disrespect to the vendors in this area, or to the many solid, decent products they offer. The fact is that asset management hasn’t taken off. If you were to ask vendors why, their marketing or public relations representative would say that the Web is driving cross-media publishing, and that publishers and creative professionals are only beginning to understand the value, savings, and efficiencies that asset management can bring to their businesses.

“Yeah, right,” is my response.

Vendors can add all the bells and whistles they want — integration with Web management tools, for example — to their products, but I’d still say asset management software lost at the Olympic trials this summer. Only if it trains very hard for the next few years — and gets a little lucky — will it compete in the 2004 games. Here’s why.

Cross Remedial Publishing
First, if you want to see a designer bristle, just utter the phrase “cross-media publishing.” Watch their cropped, magenta-dyed hair stand on end and their nose ring wiggle as their nostrils flare with disgust. It’s a meaningless term coined by vendors and marketers that doesn’t describe how creative professionals really work.

For the most part, print designers design for print; Web designers design for the Web. Each camp performs its individual tasks and respects the other’s specialty. There’s little “crossing” happening, just as there are discrete roles played by the designer, prepress person, and printer in an all-print workflow. And regardless of whether print and Web design and production tasks are performed by one team or several, the simple fact is that content must be uniquely shaped for each medium in which it’s published.

Here Comes XML
Asset management software is presented as an end-all and be-all solution, but in many ways it’s largely unnecessary. File-naming conventions and well-thought-out networked storage systems with proper security and authorization capabilities suffice for most folks and are, in fact, the foundation of good asset management systems. And the most effective technology for streamlining publishing to both print and the Web is XML, not what storage device or database sits behind the firewall.

But either XML isn’t ready for publishing prime time or publishers aren’t ready for XML, depending on your perspective, so even though asset management systems are going the XML route, they’re still more hassle than help. Implementing such systems involves a high level of planning, investment, overhead, and energy, and the gains in production efficiencies are relatively few: Asset management systems may automate some processes (automatically downsampling images for the Web, for example, or providing version control), but they don’t change the fact that both the print and online product require hands-on design and production.

Brand that Golden Calf!
Vendors will also argue that the payoff of asset management software comes with the way it facilitates “branding.” They love to share factoids like the Marlboro man is worth $4 billion, and that branding is the fourth-largest percentage of the GNP. But give me a break. Asset management is just one of many technologies used to publish and promote brands, and companies have long been promoting brands effectively with or without asset management software. And the truth is, it’s the people who devise and apply the brand creatively that determine its success. Technology is ancillary. Methinks asset management vendors take a bit more credit than is due on this front.

In my humble opinion, asset management is doing some things right, some wrong. Focusing on XML is right; chest-pounding is wrong. Any technology with such a cocky view of its role in the “supply chain” (this month’s vacuous buzz phrase) is simply going to turn off customers, especially when it’s overly complex. A realistic self-image will serve asset management systems much better in the long run, as will focused products that provide concrete production efficiencies and real-world savings. That’s ultimately what it will take for asset management to play well with others.