Real Story Group. Make Better Technology Decisions.

Kas Thomas

Routing around potholes in the DAM road

8-May-2008

Tags: Digital and Media Asset Management, Marketplace at Large, Selecting Technology

In an earlier post, prompted by my recent involvement as co-lead analyst (with Theresa Regli) on The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008, I commented on a few areas in which DAM and MAM vendors seem to have mastered some content management principles that Web CMS vendors (who tend, by and large, to be a bit younger than their DAM counterparts) perhaps shouldn't have to reinvent or discover on their own. Things like capturing metadata on every item that goes into a repository, and storing that metadata as tables in a relational database where the data can easily be queried, mined, and managed.

DAM vendors may have gotten some important things right, but in certain areas there's a great deal of catch-up left to do. I'll comment briefly on a couple of those areas: workflow and reporting. Bear in mind, these remarks don't apply to every vendor; there are exceptions.

One area where DAM offerings tend (surprisingly often) to come up short, out of the box, is workflow. In speaking with DAM licensees, I found this to be one of the most frequently voiced complaints. ("We liked everything but their workflow system.") What's particularly striking about this shortcoming is that asset management tends to be more process-intensive, while most web publishing scenarios only require relatively simple approval workflows.

Nevertheless, Web CMS vendors seem to have figured out that the process of making content consumable is indeed a process that sometimes needs to accommodate well understood flow-control rules, actors with definite roles, time-out and retry policies, logging, error-handling, and at least some degree of administrative oversight (so that in-progress workflows can be monitored and obsolete or orphaned workflow instances can be killed). More fundamentally, a workflow is something that can be modeled. Most DAM offerings have no real understanding of that.

Much of what masquerades as workflow in the DAM world is simply e-mail-based reminder routing (with no real state management). There's seldom any formal support for fan-out, fan-in, role-based delegation, retry policies, quorum constraints, escalation, or rollback. DAM customers who need something more robust than simple e-mail chaining typically find themselves having to integrate a third-party workflow solution, or else build a custom solution. Either way, it means significant added cost.

Meanwhile, reporting and auditing facilities also remain incredibly weak in many DAM products. (Of course, as Web CMS Report readers know, quite a few WCMS offerings are guilty here too.) You would think that a product that comes with a versioning subsystem would offer file check-out history views, but even that kind of rudimentary reporting capability is frequently missing from DAM systems. Likewise, "auditing" often turns out to be nothing more than event-logging. The ability to dump log data to an Excel file frequently gets touted as a "convenience" -- sorry folks: it's not.

There are a couple of quick takeaways here for prospective DAM (and WCM) licensees. First, don't confuse team-based collaboration (no matter how cleverly supported) with workflow. If you need to be able to model what you're doing and launch auditable instances of it, you need bona fide workflow support. Decide up front whether that's what you in fact need, and if so, don't let a demo-god convince you that an ad hoc notification system with "approval" written all over it constitutes workflow.

Likewise, understand that event logging is not synonymous with auditing and reporting (any more than data is the same thing as information). Consider your reporting and auditing needs in the context of your workflow needs; security requirements; the "turnover" characteristics of your content (and user population); and corporate accountability (governance) requirements. Also consider the degree to which you might need real-time monitoring capability in addition to offline or time-shifted reporting.

When it comes to workflow and reporting, don't assume that the basic functionality that should be in a product will be in it. In the DAM world, that's all too often not the case, and you'll need to budget for it.

Those are just a couple of quick thoughts. For a much more detailed discussion of these (and other) issues, with an in-depth look at how some of the best-known DAM and MAM vendors address (or fail to address) these points in their currently shipping offerings, be sure to consult The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008. You can find a free sample here.