A blueprint for unifying siloed digital assets to maximize value
Across the digital organizations of our media, financial services, and healthcare clients, a common and critical business challenge has emerged: maximizing the value of digital assets and capitalizing on market opportunities, and maintaining competitive advantage.
Unquestionably, this is seen as a pervasive trend as our clients’ employees create large volumes of content regularly. Since the content is produced in many forms, including text, images, video, audio, graphics, logos, animations, artwork, games, CAD documents, PowerPoint presentations, or any combination. To manage content assets, companies store different types of assets on different systems: web content management, digital asset management, media asset management, document management, wikis, and rights management systems—not to mention content stored on un-indexed share drives and desktops.
For example, when employees need to find a particular asset, they don’t know where to start and have no efficient way to search across all these siloed systems.
The results: Projects are delayed, employees become frustrated, and productivity is lost. Worse yet, investments made in previous technology solutions are wasted, and most importantly, companies lose the power to maximize full return on investments. Inevitably, customers and stakeholders are disappointed with the inefficiency of their efforts and placing their competitive position at risk. More than ever before, our clients’ workforces need the ability to efficiently search across information silos and quickly obtain the assets they need to create new capabilities and products.
How Did We Get Here?
Companies spend significant time, effort, and resources acquiring and developing proprietary content. This includes multimedia, rich media, and text assets—these valuable resources naturally multiply over time and can grow exponentially through mergers and acquisitions.
What’s Your Number?
Many companies have five, ten, or even more asset management systems to handle their complex data needs. Information silos are inadvertently created, and the company’s intellectual property is difficult to retrieve and use before long.
Furthermore, as digital content assets multiply, most companies implement single-point solutions to manage the volumes of specific types of digital assets. Each system has unique, inconsistent metadata and rights information—requiring employees to wrestle with multiple repositories to find the resources.
Without a consolidated solution to find, use, and manage digital assets, your workforce becomes inefficient and frustrated.
Are Content Silos Slowing Productivity?
Take this quick test to see if content silos are impacting the efficiency of your organization’s workforce:
- How many different DAMS and other content systems control your enterprise’s digital assets?
- What is the volume of all your media content (gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes)?
- How much of your content is currently underutilized because of ‘content silo-sprawl’?
- How difficult is it to find all media related to a given topic, across all content systems?
- Are you able to conduct cross-system searches?
- Can you quickly and easily reuse your content to create new digital products?
- What other business processes are involved in obtaining digital materials (i.e., gaining rights clearance to use a given asset)? How difficult are these processes to complete?
- What other business processes are involved in obtaining digital materials (i.e., gaining rights clearance to use a given asset)? How difficult are these processes to complete?
- What revenue opportunities are lost and what needless costs are incurred due to an impaired ability to reuse content?
How to Unify Your Silos and Search with Confidence
VC provides an approach to help mid-sized to enterprise companies rapidly search across all content silos. We gather a solid understanding of your environment and implement an enterprise search | unified information access (UIA) platform to join all the repositories within your organization together. The unified access automates business processes, improves productivity, reduces costs, and accelerates new business opportunities.
Discovery: Understanding the Environment
Furthermore, Visual Continuity’s (VC) digital asset management and search experts set out to understand our client’s unique business needs and implement customized solutions for unified information access. It is not a “one size fits all” approach. Before we can recommend a UIA strategy, we need to conduct a current state analysis of your existing processes and systems.
What is Unified Information Access?
IDC defines unified information access as “…a platform that provides a single point of access to multiple, disparate sources of information. It integrates large volumes of unstructured and structured data to provide complete information to users.” These platforms are highly scalable and combine elements of database and search technologies to make information access dynamic.
Our assessment includes:
- Identify and interview key stakeholders across the enterprise to discover business needs and pain points
- Understand business processes around obtaining and using specific digital assets
- Identify systems that support business processes
By establishing a common understanding of the current environment across key constituents, we are positioned to analyze the supporting technology platforms more closely and how work gets done.
Strategic Vision: How Does Everything Work Together?
After forming a common understanding of the current environment, we review and analyze business operations and supporting technology platforms to identify areas of improvement. We determine the most viable approach to resolving problems related to finding key digital assets. To do so, we:
- Create an application inventory to identify the primary purpose, integration points, and other key attributes of each system supporting business processes
- Design system diagrams and workflows to uncover process inefficiencies
- Develop an opportunities matrix based on constituent pain points to simplify access to digital assets
- Identify opportunities for asset repository consolidation.
In brief, visually seeing how employees and systems work together helps us understand how to tailor a unified information access strategy and platform that fits each unique situation.
The Power of UIA
In this example, our media client sought to produce a new mobile application quickly but experienced major slowdowns when content producers couldn’t find needed assets. The assets were stored across multiple non-intergrated systems that included videos and 3D graphics in a media asset management system (MAM); production stills in a digital asset management system (DAM); maps in a GIS system; and text files on a shared drive.
Additionally, inconsistent, incomplete, and inaccurate metadata across the MAM and DAM systems created more challenges.
We implemented a UIA tool to unify the content across disparate systems. And then, using the detailed information within the text files to find video and production stills, the UIA tool threads a ribbon through all the content sources to improve the findability of assets. Additionally, by unifying the content into a single index, the end-users can quickly find assets across platforms using a single search.
Better yet, since the metadata is now indexed in a single enterprise search tool, developers can use a well-documented set of APIs to rapidly produce new workflows and applications to meet rapidly evolving business needs. allowing the business to keep pace with changing market demands for new products.
Requirements Gathering: Finding the Right Software Solution
Naturally, with many different types of technologies designed to unify content silos, figuring out which one will work best for you is a time-consuming and daunting task. That’s where VC’s deep expertise comes in. Armed with a solid understanding of your problems and needs, we can pinpoint the ideal software solution for you. We tackle requirement gathering by:
- Developing a project charter with specific goals and key problems to be solved
- Identify key features the solution must possess and business scenarios the solution must support.
- Determine which unified information access platforms are a potential fit
- Creating a Request For Proposal (RFP) for soliciting vendors
Gathering all this information allows us to review all the possible options for our clients and determine the best-fit choice.
Selection & Evaluation: What’s the Best Solution?
Next in the process is vendor evaluation and selection. VC brings a deep understanding of unified information access technologies and how they can address business needs. We:
- Use a weighted scorecard method to narrow down the vendor candidates
- Secure commitment for a proof of concept and demo from the top candidates
- Guide vendors through the proof of concept using the required business scenarios and scorecard
- Conduct a survey to gather feedback from key stakeholders
- Identify the effort and cost to implement the top options
- Analyze the results to recommend a final solution
Implementation: Customizing the Software Solution
Additionally, a unified information access platform will provide the framework needed to resolve search, access, and re-use pain points, but it needs to be tailored to work with your systems and processes.
In fact, every company has unique pain points and requirements, there might not be a single out-of-the-box software solution. VC’s business acumen and strong technical knowledge enable us to plan, tailor, and implement the best-matched solution for your environment. We ensure the platform is well-integrated with your disparate systems and build out efficient workflows to automate processes.
Get the Most Value from Your Digital Assets
As I have shown, VC maximizes the full value of digital assets by delivering enhanced search, access, and reuse capabilities that allow you to:
- Improve your competitive advantage by providing a single point of access to all digital assets
- Achieve higher productivity and improve efficiencies
- Grow your company and recognize new business opportunities
- Cut costs and reduce the need to purchase third-party assets
- Streamline workflows through automation
- Enhance assets by combining and associating metadata from various sources.
- Lowers IT costs by centralizing access to information and eliminating outdated systems
As a result, by simplifying processes for obtaining relevant information, employees can work faster to achieve and deliver a competitive market advantage.