Digital asset management initiatives usually involve multiple stakeholders representing different organizational divisions, such as creative, marketing, and IT. In this series, we’re highlighting some of the common stakeholders we see involved in a DAM project and discussing their unique challenges and priorities.

The VP of IT is usually responsible for overseeing all technology projects within an organization and making relevant changes to optimize the organization’s ability to meet their business goals, as well as reducing business risks or downtime. They oversee the research, development, and management of technology portfolios for each department, as well as audit and track existing technologies. Ultimately, the VP of IT implements and enforces policies and procedures to ensure all executed technology will improve business processes and increase user satisfaction.

In this section we will cover

• Goals and Challenges of the VP of IT
• VP of IT Impact on a DAM Project
• Benefits of a DAM to the VP of IT

Goals and Challenges of the VP of IT

The VP of IT typically focuses on these three primary goals to achieve marketing success.

1. Introducing technologies aligned with organization-wide goals

The VP of IT is accountable for corporate-level technology vision and implementation across the organization. In addition to finding solutions that align with budget requirements, the VP of IT also needs to prioritize technologies that will drastically improve business processes, increase organizational efficiency and provide a high return on investment.

The VP of IT needs to analyze which technology will best meet the organization’s needs today, and also scale in the future as the company grows and priorities change.

2. Ensuring systems meet security and compliance requirements

Typically, when individual departments are looking to implement new technology, they’re concerned with the functional components, like the usability of the platform, how features align with their use case, and available integrations. The IT department, however, is focused on critical, security-related components, like regional and industry compliance (HIPAA, FERPA, etc.) and organization-required security measures (SOC2, Single-Sign-On, etc.).

This means that in addition to meeting the functionality requirements, selected platforms need to meet IT’s security, scalability, and compliance requirements. They also need to conform to the larger organizational goals and roadmaps.

3. Increasing technology adoption and solution satisfaction

The IT department is ultimately responsible for the company’s employee and stakeholder efficiency and productivity. This means ensuring that implemented solutions are adopted to their full potential and any issues are resolved within the SLAs (service level agreements) established for the end users. It’s crucial for solution support, onboarding, and training options to align with IT’s expectations.

The VP of IT analyzes platforms based on their likelihood of achieving high adoption and meeting established SLAs, often prioritizing systems that offer their own comprehensive training and adoption programs.

VP of IT Impact on a DAM Project

While digital asset management projects typically originate in the marketing department, they still need to align with the organization’s overall infrastructure.

The VP of IT needs to evaluate how a DAM initiative will affect IT support SLAs, align with the overall technology roadmap, and impact departmental efficiency and collaboration.

Here are questions for the VP of IT to consider when making decisions about a DAM initiative:

1. Are marketing-related storage costs (media, content, photography, digital archive) growing faster than the IT budget, as large volumes of video and media content are consistently added?

2. Are IT and support team SLAs being stretched as marketing demands increase for new media format support, management, and sharing?

3. Do users have an optimal experience when previewing, sharing, and collaborating on business-critical content? Are there technology-related bottlenecks preventing users from being productive?

4. Is the total cost of governance increasing as new content and digital assets are being stored across personal storage and unverified cloud systems? What’s the impact of asset loss?

5. If the company’s digital assets contain sensitive information, are they managed and governed in a compliant manner? Are existing content storage systems compliant?

6. Do you have redundant digital files (videos, media, images, content, PPTs, PDFs) across multiple hard drives and storage? How does this affect storage costs?

7. Is there anything preventing the organization from using cloud-based solutions? Is there a preference for the type of cloud platform?

8. Which cloud platforms, AI vendors, and integrations best align with the overall IT strategy?

Benefits of a DAM to the VP of IT

When approaching a VP of IT with the benefits of digital asset management, it’s important to think high level. Here are some benefits to consider highlighting:

Enterprise-Level Security: A DAM offers various security measures, such as triple redundancy, geo-replication, single sign-on, and more to ensure that the company’s assets are safe from loss due to human error or natural disaster.

Comprehensive Compliance: DAM cloud providers, like Microsoft Azure, deliver a large set of compliance certifications and attestations, such as FIPS, HIPPA, FERPA, and ISO 27018, and offers data residency in over 40 regions across the world.

Scalability: A DAM is able to scale endlessly and adapt to internal changes easily, as the organization grows and changes.

Support and Training: A DAM vendor typically offers support and training as part of their solution, allowing the IT department to focus on other initiatives.

Reduced TCO for Storage: A DAM reduces costs for storage hardware and removes the costs for upgrades, maintenance, and disaster recovery.

This is the second of a three-part series highlighting common stakeholders you need to get on board with digital asset management. Don’t forget to also look at the priorities of the CMO and Creative Operations.

Here’s some other helpful content, to help you build the business case for DAM project across your organization:

• ROI Calculator and Business Case
• Key Stakeholder Benefits Deck
• 3 Categories of Users to Consider

As a CTO, I evaluate emerging technologies that have the potential to massively transform or disrupt the industry that we are in. So, I try to gain a comprehensive understanding of the technology, look at how various industries are adopting it, and determine if it can provide a significant competitive advantage for our company. If the likelihood of transforming or disrupting the industry is high, then a strategy needs to be formulated to leverage the technology in a manner that quickly brings value to our customers and the market overall.

Let’s take the advent of cloud computing as an example. Eight years ago, we determined that cloud computing would change the Digital Asset Management (DAM) space by radically reducing the cost structure while materially increasing security, redundancy, and accessibility. We explored our options in cloud infrastructure and figured we could develop a cloud-based SaaS offering that had unmatched scalability, reliability, and resiliency. We asked ourselves – “What is our cloud strategy?” After looking at the DAM market and our options for delivering a cloud-based DAM system, we decided to adopt the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud offering, Microsoft Azure, as it was being developed to cater to the enterprise market. This decision was a landmark point in our history as it not only allowed us to focus on building and operating the best software we could – and not waste resources on maintaining and supporting IT infrastructure, but it also gave us a major competitive advantage that continues to this day. We have executed our cloud strategy as planned and we are continuing to build on it each quarter.

Blockchain and the Future of DAM

Blockchain is perhaps the next technological marvel after cloud computing that has reached significant levels of adoption and has raised substantial interest not only in consumer-based applications but for the enterprise as well. Enterprise-class blockchain technologies such as Ethereum, Corda, and Hyperledger have grown rapidly in support and adoption over the past 12 months. The Ethereum Enterprise Alliance was formed earlier this year with members such as Microsoft, Banco Santander, National Bank of Canada, ING, and Cornell University’s research group; Corda was developed by R3 and 80 of the world’s largest financial institutions; And, Hyperledger was spearheaded by IBM and is supported by well-known technology companies such as Intel and Oracle and financial services firms such as JP Morgan, ABN AMRO and Wells Fargo.

A new wave of blockchain technologies has introduced the concept of Smart Contracts and is now being referred to as Blockchain 2.0. Just like we saw the future of the DAM space changing with the emergence of PaaS cloud computing, I believe that Blockchain 2.0 will herald a new era for DAM.

The Internet of Value

At its core, blockchain is a secure, decentralized, and distributed ledger system that records transactions across many computers. The validity of a transaction is determined by the consensus of the various computers or nodes in the network instead of having a central trusted or official record. These transactions represent value being transferred from one entity to another. Because of this, several thought leaders have coined the term “Internet of Value”.

Digital assets possess value and they are used as a medium of exchange. Cryptography is used to facilitate and secure these transactions. Hence, cryptocurrency, one form of digital assets, has become a buzzword in the financial services industry. When people talk about blockchain, it often gets associated with FinTech because of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. However, FinTech is not the only industry that blockchain will affect in the future.

For example, the creative services industry also deals with digital assets that carry value, media assets (i.e. photos, graphics, videos, audio, etc.). Intellectual property ownership and attribution establish value for media assets and Blockchain technologies can be used to verify the transfer of ownership of media assets or even just the right to access and use such assets. With the introduction of SmartContracts in BlockChain 2.0, I believe various types of supply chains in almost every conceivable vertical, not only in FinTech or MarTech, will be massively disrupted in the very near future. Imagine the possibility of having computer protocols facilitate, verify and enforce the execution of contracts in all buyer-supplier relationships.

Blockchain in the Media Asset Lifecycle

As I have come to realize over the last few years in serving our customers, digital asset management systems (DAMs) go well beyond ingesting, cataloging, securing, storing, transforming, sharing, and retrieving media assets. DAMs have evolved significantly and now, in many cases, facilitate the management of the entire lifecycle of digital media assets – from womb to tomb, from media asset creation to archival. In every stage of the lifecycle, the ownership and attribution of the media assets may change. This is where Blockchain technologies come in.

To illustrate this point, here’s a simple example: When a company commissions a photo shoot, the photographer may submit 100 photos of which the company has paid to only select and purchase the rights to 10 images. Until the images are selected and purchased, the ownership of all 100 images belongs to the photographer. Stored in the photographer’s cloud-based media library, the buyer will log in and selects the photos from the shoot that they want to purchase. Upon completion and approval of the selection by the photographer, the selected photos will be transferred to the company’s media library and SmartContracts record and facilitate the transfer of ownership and the agreed-to rights.

During the content creation process, it’s not unusual for multiple parties to be contracted by a company to deliver a single piece of content and SmartContracts will allocate the shared ownership rights amongst the various creators of the content. For example, in a video production for an ad, the company can hire a director, videographer, crew, modeling agency, etc. SmartContracts can be used to allocate and enforce the stake of each content creator in the production of the content.

In the case of companies that own content, they can easily transfer ownership of their content to other parties using SmartContracts in the same way. For example, a digital agency or a video production outfit can decide to sell content that they own to another company. They can also decide to license content to another company that publishes or distributes the content. These transactions, the transfer or sharing of rights between parties, are all recorded and executed using SmartContracts on a Blockchain network.

What’s Next?

There are three types of Blockchain networks – Public, Private, and Consortium. Public networks are completely open and anyone can join and participate. Private networks are typically used by companies for internal purposes within business units with known participants. A Consortium is a partially decentralized network where participants are known to the members of the consortium and the consensus process is controlled by a pre-selected set of nodes in the network.

The massively transformative vision for Blockchain in the DAM industry is for content distribution to be decentralized and democratized in a public blockchain network where creators of media assets can publish, broadcast, and distribute their work and get compensated for the value they generate. This, however, at this point in time, is more of a moonshot than a bankable strategy. I think, what we need right now, is a federation of digital asset media libraries that can serve as a distributed and decentralized ‘system of record’ for digital media in an enterprise Blockchain ecosystem. This will establish concrete media asset ownership rights and attribution for media assets as a first step before we tackle the much larger and more complicated content licensing and distribution space.

Our first step towards this future is anchoring MediaValet’s Blockchain strategy on Ethereum. Using SmartContracts and cryptlets on an Azure-based, enterprise-class, blockchain consortium network, we will allow tenants within the MediaValet digital asset management platform to participate. Once achieved, we’ll open up membership to other platforms that are considered “systems of record”.

With the pending release of Microsoft’s new Coco Framework for enterprise blockchain networks in early 2018, my team and I will be among the first to evaluate its promise of more performant throughput, more flexible confidentiality models, and more distributed governance. If these prove true, our timeline of how quickly blockchain will affect the DAM space will shorten dramatically.

We believe blockchain will have a major impact on the future of the DAM space, and we plan, as we are doing with many other new technologies, to be amongst the vanguard to commercialize the technology.

To learn more, check out our brochure “How to Leverage Blockchain in DAM“