TAME YOUR ASSETS

Henrik de Gyor (2012) chides companies for ignoring to factor in the ability to scale when considering a DAM system. “Do not think short term unless you enjoy frequent database migrations.” A successful company should prepare for growth and that means choosing tools that will grow with them.

Granted having a DAMS that scales is great, but how favorably will it scale when the time comes? There’s no way of knowing for sure. Sometimes the best-laid plans fail and migration is the only alternative. The possibility must certainly be considered because of today’s world of volatile technology. Some companies that offered DAMS in the past have either discontinued supporting their systems or they have fallen out of favor. There’s nothing like a software brick to weigh down a company’s work-flow.

Some companies, de Gyor continued, setup additional DAMS in response to their growing volumes of digital assets. This thinking is in opposition to the main reasons of having a DAM; it flies in the face of sharing the same assets across an organization.  I would like to add that running multiple DAMS increase the risk of duplicate assets.

Henrik de Gyor lists elements of a company that must scale. Noticeably absent from he list are preservation, lifecycle, data migration, and software migration. All four of these tasks need to be tweaked and updated if they are to remain important to their owners. I also find it interesting that little was written about ROT (content that is redundant, out-dated, or trivial) and methods to purge these unwanted assets (Putkey, 2012). I suppose this issue needs to be dealt with by individual companies. The process should be part of a preservation plan, put into place prior to a DAMS’ implementation.

Upon reading de Gyor’s post, I want to adopt this mantra: “If you cannot search, you cannot find. If you cannot find, you cannot use, reuse nor repurpose.” The phrase situates searching as the most important element of asset retrieval. For it to be perfect, though, shouldn’t the words “the way you want to” be added after search? After all, there are many methods of searching. We should use the one that works the best of us. In addition to the many reasons de Gyor listed, shouldn’t a user-group’s searching method also be scalable?