Managing Risks With Digital Asset Management

This article is about risks with Digital Asset Management initiatives and describes some strategies you can use to manage them.

What is Risk?

Risk can be defined as the probability of a given event occurring and the impact that it is likely to have. Uncertainty is an unavoidable feature of introducing new technology, risk management exists to help deal with that in a structured fashion.

Identifying Risks With Digital Asset Management

A practical approach to identifying potential risks with DAM is to work backwards from the benefits. For every advantage you expect to gain from DAM, there is a corresponding risk. Modifying the method used to achieve an objective can increase or decrease both the impact and probability of the risk.

Example DAM Implementation Risks

Below are some potential benefits of DAM (not all may apply to every DAM implementation)

• DAM will solve a multitude of issues we have with our current use of digital assets
• DAM will help us find our assets more quickly
• Cloud DAM will allow us to avoid capital expenditure on internal IT facilities
• DAM will allow everyone to share and re-use assets
• We can control how assets are being used
• We can find out what assets are in demand

From each of these, you can extrapolate some risks that may become issues. Each are described below, the order that correlates to the benefits above. This is evidently nowhere near all of the range of risks you will encounter, but you should start to see how to apply the strategy.

Commissioning multi-purpose DAM solutions that fail to address any single requirement adequately

When I talk to prospective DAM users, most acknowledge that it is a bad idea to try and build monolithic systems that try to answer multiple requirements simultaneously. However, a number frequently still end up doing it anyway and expose themselves to more risk than they needed to.

Ideally, DAM initiatives should be started with a very restricted and well defined scope. Sometimes that might mean not buying a DAM product initially, but just auditing what assets exist and analyzing what range of solutions offer the most benefit. Digital Asset Management describes a huge range of solutions with multiple options on offer. A risk management strategy for implementing DAM suggests that funds should be invested incrementally in a bottom-up manner based on proven need and regular reviews.

As you examine your needs and begin to introduce systems, different requirements and alternative ways to approach the problem will be revealed. If you handle this with risk management in mind, you can change direction and ensure that you do not waste funds introducing features or solutions that are less useful than you once thought (or were told) they might be.

Unsuitable asset findability and cataloging strategies

DAM systems provide the ability to search for assets very quickly, but they only get found if they have been cataloged using descriptive and meaningful metadata that reflects the underlying media file. The risk is that assets just get uploaded and only perfunctory cataloging metadata is added. If no one can find anything, there is a risk that users might start hoarding their assets in personally owned collections. To ensure that does not happen, a findability strategy together with cataloging procedures and training which support it are all needed.

Relying exclusively on a single asset storage hosting provider

While you can reduce internal IT expenditure if you put all your assets into a Cloud based or hosted DAM, you need a contractually watertight exit strategy and full transparency about data safety procedures. It is also prudent to consider arranging your own backups. If the provider ceases to trade and you have nothing in place, it might be very difficult to retrieve your assets. From the opposite perspective, deciding to do it all in-house might be no better (or even worse) if your internal backup procedures and off-site storage fail or were not in place to start with. There will also be a cost implication to cover increased server utilization and extra capacity etc.

A risk mitigation technique might be to not rely on one single provider but to hedge your risk with some alternative options that are completely separate from whoever hosts the servers with your DAM solution running on them. The downside is increased cost, but the benefit is like taking out a form of insurance and affords you some protection should the worst happen.

 

Continue reading this article:

1 2 3 Next Page >

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com