TAME YOUR ASSETS

(please find both articles I discuss referenced at the end of this blog entry)

Today I made an interesting connection between Peter Norville’s (2012) Understanding Information Architecture PREZI and Mark Davey’s (2012) blog entry about Enterprise silos, which were both linked to from the DAM Foundation’s website. Now that the public is using a variety means of accessing urls — via social networking, a sites main web page, etc.– there are multiple points, or “front doors”, that companies must build and maintain. This is accomplished by making sure that a company’s outward facing information is consistent and accurate. Davey and Norville both point to a result from a paradigm shift in the public’s retrieval and consumption of information. Many of have called this new model web 2.0. Davey finishes by stating that silos are no longer inevitable. How are they inevitable? It would seem his blog entry is a teaser for a webinar he is hosting on the subject entitled The Coming Fall of Silo Information and Thinking or Web 3.0.

The disadvantages of silos have already been discussed. According to Henrik de Gyor, they prevent assets from being shared across a company. This reduces the asset’s value, even increasing company expenditures if employees must recreate or repurchase the asset. Although DAMs are powerful tools that enable sharing of assets, they are as effective as the users make them. For example, some companies have many different DAMs for no reason. Each tailored to a silo. This defeats the purpose of a DAM and misses an opportunity to save the company money. The sharing of approved logos, speeches, and videos through a DAM ensures every branch of an organization is communicating the same information. A consistent representation promotes a source’s credibility and brand.

Conversely, there are situations where silos may be unavoidable such as within the U.S. defense department, where silos are used for security. The strategy nullifies any breach/hacking attempt from one silo into another. Any other organization can attain access control through permission-based logins. This promotes security and allows DAM administrators to track user date for analysis.

There is a rapidly growing trend of releasing control of information to users. The public has come to expect it. Apple’s marketing relies on this strategy. It would seem that social networking is beginning to effect the way enterprises work internally. Sharing information within a company is being accepted as a means to success. I’m looking forward to discovering how Mr. Davey defines web 3.0 and what arguments belie his assertion that it is around the corner.

REFERENCES

The End of Information Silos. (2012). Retrieved from http://blogs.adamsoftware.net/Webinars/TheEndofInformationSilos.aspx

Understanding Information Architecture by Peter Morville on Prezi. (2012). Retrieved from http://prezi.com/aafmvya6bk7t/understanding-information-architecture/