Many people may remember the Monica Lewinsky story. Few people know about what it took to find that ONE image of her hugging President Clinton, photographed by Dirck Halstead two years before the story came out. Every other photographer at that event had deleted most of their digital photographs (or thrown away the rest of their film) and simply kept the images used that day. No big deal, right? They were just recording history every day, but not realizing it. The breaking news had left them empty handed when they really needed those images. This one photograph (shot on film and later scanned digitally for publication) was used months later for the cover of a major news magazine about the story of that time. That photograph was later used as a reference point by all the television networks who found their archived video footage. Now imagine if this was today’s photographers (now almost completely shooting digital), how quickly that image could have been found if archived in a DAM with metadata which referenced the location, event and names of the subjects photographed (i.e. President Clinton). It would not have taken days to cull through 5000 digital photographs of President Clinton, but more likely minutes or hours. Doesn’t that sound more deadline-friendly?
To answer the question, why should I limit the deleting:
Delete only what is totally unusable. Archive the rest.
Use metadata so people can find and sort through all assets. And not just find them visually.
Keep it searchable and available. Don’t be the only person who can find your assets. You are not going to live forever and you probably won’t work there for the rest of your life.
Digital storage media is cheap. Buy more than you need and then back up all of it regularly.
Limit who has the right to delete from your archive or DAM.
For more on the photography aspects of this topic, take a look at Vincent Laforet’s blog.
Let us know when you are ready for some vendor neutral consulting on Digital Asset Management.
Some organizations may have considered a DAM (Digital Asset Management) system, but thought:
“We’ll do it later” or “We don’t need one of those DAM things.”
In the same breath, you might as well pick any of the following phrases below:
“We don’t need to save moneynow.”
“We will be here forever, so we will be able to preserve our institutional knowledge.”
“We love filing cabinets full of CDs, DVDs, tapes as well as multiple external hard drives, shared drives, folder structures on our computers and other ‘organized’ methods tostore and manageour files every day. There is no other way to do this today.”
“We can’tfind anything promptly, and we’re okay with that.”
“We can wait until tomorrow when the other office is openwith the files we need for that presentation today.”
“We will continue to wait for Joe to come back from vacation and Susan to return from sick leave to retrieve files we really needed for that public release last week.”
“We love employees who hoard company assets on just their computer that are so important to our business. What could possibly ever happen to their computer or them for that matter? Our employees never go anywhere.”
“We love to wait hours or days for files, don’t we all?”
“We like to waste time and money and so do our managers.”
“We don’t need to know what files we have. Why would anyone want to know that?”
“We don’t accumulate many files each year. We trash our intellectual property every few months just to clear our limited hard drive space. It’s really no big deal.”
“There is no other way we can be more efficient. We each have our very own sets of standards and procedures followed sometimes.”
“We love paper. It’s so cheap. We like swimming in it too. What’s a PDF anyhow?”
“Why would we change how we deliver stuff? Mailing stuff is really cheap and fast nowadays. We don’t even need email today.”
“We can only collaborate in person or by email nowadays. What will they think of next? Telecommuting for office workers? We would have to trust our employees.”
“We have to hold all our files very close, so no one can find our files including us.”
“We love re-creating files over again because we can’t find it to use it again. In fact, we’ll do it all over again next month.”
“We love to think insidethe box. We don’t streamline anything around here. I know because I’m an innovator. We don’t need any changes here.”
“Improveworkflow? Our work flows just fine around here. We do not need to upgrade any software nor hardware each decade.”
“Change costs money. Technology can’t save the organization time and money. We just need more people to work harder and longer hours. That’s why they are here, and they know it.”
None of these ridiculous phrases have to be true in any organization today. Everything listed in bold can be done with DAM. If you don’t believe any of these ‘unspoken ways of doing business’ actually happen in your organization, find out how all your files are really stored and managed every year. Be ready for a surprise. Aside from what was discussed in the last 20 points above:
Can you find every file created last month or last year?
What if the person looking did not create nor archive any of the files they are looking for themselves?
How quickly can these files be accessed?
How many files do you have?
Where are these files kept?
Are they archived for future use?
How many files are redundant (not a backup copy nor a different version)?
How can you be sure without opening each file?
There is a better way. With a DAM, you can know the answer to all these questions. Planning for a DAM can make any organization really audit their assets and their workflows. A properly implemented DAM can make an organization streamlined and standardized. If a DAM is applied to an organization the right way, people can efficiently and effectively store, archive, search, find, use, reuse and repurpose assets as needed. Anyone who should be able to access files can securely find out what is available at anytime from anywhere with an internet connection.
Stay tuned to this blog for more on DAM and how it can help your organization.
Another DAM Blog 