We live in an information age. Knowledge is power. Information is king and content continues to rule the roost. Most large corporations today survive and thrive because of their ability to harness the information at their disposal and to turn it into viable products and/or services. In fact, the knowledge economy is dependent on informational assets for its very survival. In the broadest possible sense of the term, information is the new age asset. But it can be considered an asset only when it can be stored, retrieved and used at the right time and place to create the maximum impact. How does one do this in this day and age, when there is a veritable information overload on all fronts?
Welcome to the world of digital asset management! At its very basic form, a digital asset is any piece of information or media that an individual or an organization can use to make a profit from. For an IT product company, the source codes to their software products constitute digital assets. For manufacturing companies, their product designs, manufacturing methodologies and plant layouts are digital assets. For an architectural firm, blueprints, construction estimates and vendor lists are digital assets. And for an individual, digital assets could range from medical records to details of insurance, investments, stocks and bonds. Since corporations are well aware of this fact, they spend countless man-hours and billions of dollars in filing, archiving, finding, displaying and using digital assets. And almost all of them, without exception use digital asset management tools and programs to do this efficiently.
The reasons why digital asset management systems are so popular, is not difficult to fathom. If informational assets were to be stored in the conventional manner, they would be riddled with inefficiencies. They would be bulky to store, susceptible to damage, difficult to find and nearly impossible to utilize at the right time. Studies reveal that most professionals spend well over 10% of their time in the quest for information they have. And in 35% of the cases, they don’t even find what they are looking for! With digital asset management tools and software however, all of these inefficiencies could be easily removed.
The benefits of using a digital asset management system are many. First and foremost, the information seeker saves time and increases productivity. With every employee of an organization thus empowered, the organization improves its bottomline. When digital asset management systems are employed in complex projects, involving scores of people working from different geographic locations, they save even more time and money that would otherwise have been spent in seeking information. Digital asset management systems also enable easy duplication and information sharing. Digital asset management systems, when used to catalogue and retrieve informational digital assets can also serve as a tool to enable insurance valuation. The intangible benefits of digital asset management systems include less stress, greater enjoyment of work and a much more streamlined lifestyle!
Several digital asset management systems are available in the market to cater to a wide array of needs. For the individual worker, desktop software works just fine. Corporate entities on the other hand, can harness the capabilities of enterprise-wide digital asset management systems to derive maximum efficiencies. These systems can be customized for specific uses, made collaborative, used to orient processes and procedures or even as an effective ERP solution. The imagination is the only boundary. But attempting to survive in the modern world without a digital asset management system – that’s futile!
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