Welcome to Volume 6, Issue 4. Summer is here, the weather is grand and our attention now turns to recreation and relaxation. And with that recreational interest so clear in our minds, there are many good reasons to curl up with this issue of Journal of Digital Asset Management for excellent summer reading to stimulate our shared interest in digital asset management (DAM).

Chad Beer, Senior Digital Asset Manager at Cline, Davis and Mann provides a fantastic article on ‘Harvesting organically grown vocabularies’. Tasked with creating two very different vocabularies for a new DAM system, the implementation team did so at a minimum of cost and time. Instead of starting from scratch, they approached the project as interviewers, organizers and translators. Grooming previously gathered data, and leveraging the expertise of in-house professionals, became the team's points of focus. Research revealed the data, already waiting, in existing repositories ranging from a robust billing system to Excel spreadsheets. They were not called ‘controlled vocabularies’ by the people who created and used them, but they identified the terms and relationships the DAM system would need. Other in-house experts were looped in to groom the existing information into the formats needed to suit the DAM system's purposes. All the while IT partners were engaged, ensuring the data would ultimately work with scripts to automatically tag files in our DAM system. Spreading the work among carefully chosen internal departments saved valuable time and costs. Leveraging user-generated tools to feed metadata into the DAM system is unifying our agency in the use of a common language.

Aaron Holm, Vice President, Development at Industrial Color Software, writes on, ‘Emerging use cases and technology for creative group production are disrupting the DAM marketplace. Creative executives are demanding better tools for the production groups’. Moving beyond DAM, cloud computing, user mobility, and social computing have changed the way software is designed, deployed and used. Holm argues that while DAM systems have stagnated and continue to build tools for IT and technology-focused individuals rather than for creative groups, creative executives are demanding better software for their production groups and are sparking a new wave of technological innovation that will fragment and disrupt the DAM market.

In her article, ‘Business Rights Management: A Primer’, Laurel Meredith, Vice-President, Business Development at RSG Media Systems, argues that while media businesses look to monetize their assets across a variety of emerging technology and distribution platforms globally, they are challenged in understanding their inventory and where that inventory may be licensed out. Contracts are increasingly complex; media businesses are increasingly scrutinized around compliance. This article explores the ways in which a robust Business Rights and Royalties Management system can introduce best practices for operational efficiency, and provide workflows to support the capture of a multi-faceted deal all the way through to royalties management and revenue recognition.

Remko Noteboom, CTO and co-founder of Southpaw Technology, provides a fascinating look into, ‘Capturing Workflow in the Digital Age’. Creating a DAM that can track a digital asset through every stage of that product's life cycle, from initial conception to final product, is a huge untapped market. Most DAM solutions are concerned with the management and ‘monetization’ of the final digital asset, which, while useful, ignores the entire process that was used to create those assets in the first place. In addition, while many project management tools attempt to manage workflow, none tie directly to the actual assets being created. Noteboom argues that as the digital world infringes more and more into mainstream business, the complexity of the digital process has become a universally significant problem, covering all markets and all sizes of organizations. This article details why the visual effects and computer graphics markets have been instrumental in bringing new, innovative solutions to mainstream markets, and how the concept of a ‘Digital Assembly Line’ can bring about solutions that are radically different from today's more traditional DAM approaches.

Expert DAM consultant, Joel Warwick enriches us with a captivating article on ‘Why goods DAMS go bad’. Post mortem analysis of under-performing DAM efforts reveal nearly universal points of failure and disconnects among the target user populations and DAM support functions. Targeted towards DAM program leaders and executives, this article surfaces the missing elements, typical challenges and how to identify and fulfill these requirements, gleaned from experience leading many DAM projects. Methodologies for properly structuring DAM projects are introduced along with candid examples of do's and don’ts. Warwick argues that DAM projects often flounder because of the misconception that the firm will realize strategic and process efficiency gains simply by rolling out a DAM system and training user populations on its functionality, only to discover they don’t understand exactly what they should do with it nor how it should be managed. DAM operations that produce real gains, whether realized straight away or in fits and starts, are distinguished by prime focus on operational design. Successful DAM projects are approached as fundamentally operational design efforts with DAM system implementation a crucial but separately scoped and staffed component of the project.

In an interview with Joseph Santucci, founder and CEO of piXlogic, John Horodyski, Managing Editor at the Journal of Digital Asset Management, tackles the issue of, ‘The Growing Metadata’. Traditional approaches to metadata creation and use are likely to come under strain as the volume of material and the importance of video in the enterprise grows. Recent advances in the field of automated image analysis and content understanding offer the potential to simplify critical elements of today's Digital Asset Management systems and related workflows. John had the opportunity to speak with Joe Santucci, founder of piXlogic, a leading company in this field, and get his take on the subject. As piXlogic shows, this new software can provide a critically needed level of automation that will help improve the value equation of today's DAM systems and make them more relevant in a rapidly changing world.

To conclude this issue, Michael Moon provides a valuable interview with the CEO of censhare, Dieter Reichert. censhare is the world's leading solution provider for the comprehensive information and process management of modern corporations and media companies. censhare has developed a software system in which all relevant company information can be compiled, as well as linked and further processed without any restrictions whatsoever. Deiter and Michael review publishing and communications workflows, Web CMS and content optimization showcasing censhare's leadership.