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Another DAM Podcast interview with Matt Shanley on Digital Asset Management

Matt Shanley discusses Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • Why does a museum use Digital Asset Management?
  • What were the drivers for getting a DAM?
  • What advice would you like to give to DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM Professionals?

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor: [0:01] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset
Management. I am Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Matt Shanley. Matt,
how are you?
Matt Shanley: [0:09] Very well, and yourself?
Henrik: [0:10] Good. Matt, how are you involved with Digital Asset
Management?
Matt: [0:14] I am the Digital Asset Manager for the Photography Department of
the American Museum of Natural History. They brought me on in 2006 to develop
a photography workflow that would stand savvy. [0:30] Basically, what they
were doing at the time is just taking everything they shot, burning it to a CD or
DVD, and putting it into a binder, and keeping an Excel spreadsheet of what
CDs were where. As you might imagine, that quickly became unmanageable.
[0:44] So when they hired me in 2006, it was a priority for them to have me redesign
their workflow and then research what hardware and software we would
need to get a Digital Asset Management system that was going to be usable
and scalable to the amount of assets that we would eventually accumulate.
[1:06] We decided to go with an Apple Xserve with a 10.5 TB X RAID, and we
decided to use Extensis Portfolio as our DAM. That has a MySQL back end with
a portfolio governing the front end.
[1:25] We started cataloging from 2006 on and then I redesigned the workflow
of the photographers to use Lightroom. It was embedding copyright metadata
on import.
[1:39] We came up with a standardized file naming and folder naming protocols
that were DAM savvy. Basically just formalized the workflow, because the photographers
were pretty much just doing their own thing and there was no real
organization to it. Had to standardize what they were doing in the workflow that
they used.
[2:05] From the time it left the camera and went onto the computer, data preservation
protocols were put in place so that things would get backed up onto
the server, so that if their local hard drive ever crashed, they would at least have
unretouched backups of everything, etc., etc.
[2:23] Then, I have to, when they finish a job, they move it to an area on the
server that I know that they’re done with that job. Then I move it over into the
portfolio sys, catalog it in portfolio. That’s how we do it.
Henrik: [2:43] Why does a museum use Digital Asset Management?
Matt: [2:45] I would say that while we are a museum photography department
we are actually a division of the communications department. We do all of the
press photography, anything that goes out to the press, advertising, marketing,
all of that stuff. We document all of the educational events that happen here.
We documents all of the development events that happen here. [3:12] What
we don’t do is we don’t, for the most part, photograph the collections for the
purposes of cataloging the specimens and artifacts that we have. That’s up to
the scientific department themselves. What museums would probably use it for
would be actually like a collections resource, management. But that is not what
this department does.
Henrik: [3:35] What were the drivers for getting a DAM?
Matt: [3:39] The bottleneck that was happening where it was just taking too
long for photo requests to be fulfilled. Once we got up over a couple hundred
thousand images, that system of burning stuff to CD and DVD became unwieldy.
It was just taking too long. Anything that wasn’t done recently it would
take someone doing much research and going through DVDs and the Excel
spreadsheet. [4:13] There was no controlled vocabulary as far as search and
keywords and stuff like that. It was just a mess. It made it very, very hard to
find things. We needed a centralized storage system that was well organized.
Keywords needed to be standardized with a controlled vocabulary. Once we did
that, it turned image requests from taking days to minutes. It was a huge efficiency
boost for us.
Henrik: [4:45] I bet. Are any of these requests you get paid requests?
Matt: [4:49] Yes. Our business development department and our museum
library both deal with requests coming in mostly from education book publishers.
We do get some of what I would call commercial requests, but it’s mostly in
the educational realm. [5:04] I don’t know how much they’re actually charging for
this stuff, but we’ll get a call. “Do you have a picture of an Apatosaurus thigh or
something like that, a thigh bone?” We’ll look through the collections and see
what we have. We’ve been shooting a mix of digital and film since around 1998.
I think by 2000 or 2002 we were shooting exclusively digital. Considering that
the museum has been here since about 1875 or so, the bulk of our collections
are shot on film.
[5:44] When we went digital the museum library did not have the manpower or
the technical expertise to handle and archive our photos, which is what, back in
the film days, we did. We always turned everything over to the library and they
would put them into the photo archive. When we went digital there was nothing
they could do with the stuff and we did what everybody did, just burn everything
to CD and DVD and store it that way. It was really the only economically
feasible solution at the time.
[6:23] But, like I said, once we got up over a couple hundred thousand assets
it was not working. Sometime in 2007 this new DAM system went online. I’ve
cataloged approximately 328,000 assets. At any given moment there’s about
100,000 assets that I haven’t gotten to yet.
[6:53] That legacy system, we had all of those CDs and DVDs copied onto the
server over a period of time and tried to clean it up as much as we could with
the limited manpower that we have available to be spending time doing that.
That’s somewhere around 210,000 assets in the legacy system.
[7:17] It’s never going to get smaller. We keep everything. So, pushing a million
assets total in no time. We have to make sure that are hardware and software
stay scalable to handling those kind of numbers.
Henrik: [7:33] Wow. Great. What advice would you like to give to DAM professionals
and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Matt: [7:39] I sort of tripped and fell into it. My background is photography.
It was my photography background that got me hired into this photography
department. Photography, digitally driven photography or organization, Digital
Asset Management is a necessity just like having an IT guy to keep your computers
working is a necessity. [8:09] I would say Higher Education is definitely the
way to go. I had to learn it from scratch, kind of on the job, on the fly. There’s
definitely a market for it out there. Anybody who deals with digital content has
to keep it organized because if you can’ find it then it’s like not having it.
[8:38] I think it’s a growing field. As more digital content is created better solutions,
on a larger scale, are going to become available. I think, even if you get
an education in it now, people who work in this field are going to have to get
reeducated in it multiple times over the course of their career. I think the technology
is going to keep changing at a rate that if you want to stay competitive
you’re going to have to keep up with it.
Henrik: [9:06] Never stop learning.
Matt: [9:07] Yeah.
Henrik: [9:08] Good point. Great. Thanks, Matt.
Matt: [9:11] Thank you. I enjoyed talking to you.
Henrik: [9:14] Me too. For more on Digital Asset Management, log onto
anotherdamblog.com. Thanks again.

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Tony Gill on Digital Asset Management

Tony Gill discusses Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • What challenges do you face using Digital Asset Management within a marketing organization?
  • What advice would you like to give to DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM Professionals?

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor: [0:02] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset
Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Tony Gill. Tony,
how are you?
Tony Gill: [0:10] I’m good. Thanks Henrik. How are you?
Henrik: [0:12] Good. How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Tony: [0:15] My job title is Global Director of Library Science and Information
Management. I work for an advertising agency that is part of one of the large
global advertising conglomerates. [0:28] We have a single client which is a very
large technology company. My role is theoretic quite general.
[0:35] In practice, I spend the vast bulk of my time running a large multi server
Digital Asset Management System that’s shared between us, our client, and
about a dozen of our sibling agencies within the same conglomerate, all working
on the same account.
[0:53] After defining the initial information architecture for the system such as the
metadata schemer and the control vocabularies, the folder hierarchy that we use
for storing the assets, asset ingest and work flow procedures.
[1:10] I now manage a team, a small team of Digital Asset Librarians who perform
the day-to-day act of managing the flow of assets throughout the system and
throughout their life cycle.
Henrik: [1:20] Great. Tony, what challenges do you face using Digital Asset
Management with a marketing organization?
Tony: [1:26] The challenges are many and varied. One of the biggest challenges
we face is just the sheer volume of assets coming into the system all the time
from a wide variety of different sources both from within our agency groups and
also from the client and from beyond. [1:43] We do have fairly well established
asset ingest procedures that require metadata to be provided with the assets.
But because there are always new users and new communities wanting to
upload assets to the system, it means there’s a constant need to keep training
people and keep bringing them up to speed on the ingest procedures. That’s
fairly challenging.
[2:05] Another factor of my job is that we have a very demanding client and
often times they will make requests to have assets organized for their particular
needs.
[2:18] Often, it’s down to me to say politely but firmly that we can’t do that because
the system has to meet the needs of a very, very broad user community.
We have something like 3,500 users on the system globally, at the moment.
[2:31] We can’t just reorganize areas of it for one group, or one individual’s requirements.
Sometimes I have to be able to politely and tactfully say, “No,” and
explain why we can’t change the structure of the system for individual user’s
needs because of the whole broad range of different user needs.
[2:55] Obviously, rights management is a perennial problem in this field. We have
to make sure we have detailed usage right information for anything where the
usage rights are not just straight forward global unlimited usage rights.
[3:13] Communicating that to people that are uploading assets is also sometimes
challenging because sometimes they haven’t even considered the usage rights.
[3:23] You have to end up doing a little mini tutorial about copyright and usage
rights and explaining why, as the publisher effectively of these assets, if we
publish them and we don’t have the correct usage rights, then we’re effectively
liable for copyright infringement even though we may have had no part in acquiring
these assets in the first place. Of course, that’s also a challenge.
[3:47] Then, the general symptom of working in the advertising industry is that
deadlines are always very short and often missed. People tend to wait until the
last minute and tend to get very anxious when we say that things are published
in a timely fashion.
[4:08] They often leave things to the last thing on a Friday night before they
upload them. We often find ourselves scrambling at the last minute to get the
stuff posted that’s urgently needed by teams all around the world right at the
last minute.
Henrik: [4:21] Sounds like a bunch of challenges there.
Tony: [4:23] Yeah.
Henrik: [4:27] What advice would you like to give DAM professionals or people
aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Tony: [4:33] From my part, if you want to come work on my team, you will need
a Library Science degree. That’s a graduate degree in Library and Information
Science. That’s a really good grounding in the kind of disciplines that are very
good in the Digital Assets Management field. [4:51] It teaches you the importance
of information architecture and information management. It teaches you
to be rigorous and to follow standards. It also teaches you an observance for
finickiness and attention to detail.
[5:05] In the job description that I wrote recently for the Digital Asset Librarians, I
said, “An almost obsessive attention to detail would be a useful attribute in any
of the successful candidates.”
[5:20] I tend to find that there are certain people that are drawn to the librarianship
role, and they also make very good digital managers. Those are the main
things that I can think of just off the top of my head.
Henrik: [5:31] Great. Thank you, Tony.
Tony: [5:33] You’re very welcome, Henrik. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.
Henrik: [5:36] Any time. For more on Digital Asset Management, log on to
anotherdamblog.com. Thanks again.

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Another DAM Podcast interview with David Lipsey on Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • You are the Conference Chair to Henry Stewart DAM Conferences. How have you seen Digital Asset Management change in the past several years?
  • What advice would you like to give to DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor: [0:02] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset
Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, I’m speaking with David Lipsey. David, how are you?

David Lipsey: [0:11] Good, Henrik. Thanks for asking and thanks for the opportunity to join you.

Henrik: [0:14] David, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

David: [0:19] I had the chance to be involved in Digital Asset Management
before the phrase even existed. I was able to become a part of one of the foundational software companies, Artesia Technologies, which grew out of work that I was doing with many other people at its precursor company at Thomson, the publisher. [0:47] We were looking at what now seems like the quaint and carriage trade idea of repurposing editorial assets to go from textbooks or the technical reference materials from Thomson into CDs which could be distributed largely for reference publishing.
Of course, out of this…Let’s call it something…Out of this spaghetti grew the
DNA of the concept of create once and use many. We weren’t able to grab the words “content management.” They had become used for web-facing applications. But we did come up with, in some sort of aggregation and a bit asystematic [1:33] with the phrase “Digital Asset Management.”
[1:37] The first companies I had the chance to with, Henrik, that were involved with this were a company that’s local to you and I, “The Washington Post,” as well as General Motors, one of the largest corporations in the world that
has an extraordinary archive of images and thousands of hours of video that they were looking to put to better work for GM and reduce the cost of finding that material.
[2:01] I’ve continued through my career, back from this early wandering into what was then an uncharted map of, “Let’s become Digital Asset Management,” through several years with Artesia, which was acquisitioned by OpenText. In subsequent roles as an industry principle for media and entertainment for SAP, then with FTI Consulting, also in the media and entertainment practice.
[2:31] My concerns go across the entire spectrum of the content industries,
whether it’s for text or image, for audio, for video, or for other kinds of files
where, again, creating once and using again can bring value to organizations, to companies, to universities, museums, etc.

Henrik: [2:54] You’re the conference chair of Henry Stewart DAM conferences, how have you seen Digital Asset Management change in the past several years?

David: [3:03] It would be interesting to plot this and do word maps or kind of idea clusters. They are fun to reflect on. I think as you and I have talked about, and as you’ve been good about presenting it at Henry Stewart, there are now actually job descriptions about, jobs which are entitled Digital Asset Manager.
[3:29] I think that, in and of itself, indicates how DAM is becoming much more of an enterprise application. I believe there’s a large transition that we’re seeing occurring right now, where we have… There’s some kind of almost sweet irony in that this application, which collapses silos between content types, a PowerPoint, a Word document, an image, a video, an audio file, has been siloed itself into many departmental applications in the businesses or organizations where DAM had been deployed.
[4:09] I think, Henrik, that we’re seeing a recognition that DAM is an enterprise resource application, much the way that payroll is. Payroll could vary if there are exempt or nonexempt employees. Payroll could certainly vary if they’re union or non-union employees, with the complexities of the workflows of that very specialized compensation methodologies that have to be deployed.
[4:36] DAM itself, I think, is moving from something that happened in various departments, which had the original budgets for this, to an enterprise application.
To tie this to your question, I think we’re seeing that in the caliber of Digital
Asset Management installations that many companies are kind enough to share at the Henry Stewart Conferences.
[5:03] For example, we now will have, this year, the third or fourth maturing presentation of the application that goes across Warner Brothers and its allied organizations at Turner and CNN, which supports not only across business lines, across asset types. But now, I don’t know how many millions of assets are managed
in that application. That’s a statement we just simply could not have made
earlier on in several years of Henry Stewart Conferences.
[5:36] I think the fact that there are emerging models for what disposition means and HR policies for hiring. There is a recognition that DAM needs to be a centralized application and that we now see, across lines of business, repositories that number in the millions of assets and are just a part of everyday life indicates some of the maturing of this field.

Henrik: [6:01] That’s true. What advice would you like to give to DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

David: [6:07] I think attending the conferences that are available is a great idea. I think the chance to understand that we’re only still, in so many ways, at the beginning of this field. Yes, the more mature vendors have been around for a dozen years or so, from the late ‘90s to here we are in late 2010. That the demands on the content and the fundability of content are something that we’re still seeing very early on. [6:43] I was in a meeting last week where I heard one of the large repurposers of content in the sports industry talk about that they currently service 106 separate digital handheld devices. This is October of 2010 when there’s only the iPad and only a nominal amount of Android smartphones.
[7:08] Just imagine, Henrik, a year from now the demand on content. And not only from industries where publishing is both a noun and a verb our friends in the book business or the movie business or TV and magazine publishing. But imagine a year from now that the demand on content from CPG [Consumer Package Goods] companies and from other manufacturers that have marketing initiatives will have exquisite tablet devices that their content can be used on.
[7:39] I’m saying this as a note to encourage them to become involved in the Digital Asset Management space and understanding that it’s a very wide-open field for someone who wants to become a DAM professional.
[7:57] I also think that someone wanting to get involved in digital liquidity within the company that they’re applying for may encounter some resistance in more entrenched departmental behaviors or operations. Nothing unusual. It’s just that the VPs or department managers may have been working with certain workflows for a long time and someone coming into the field, especially someone who is…
[8:31] There’s Schwinn Bicycle involved in iPhone and digital wheels, if you will, is going to be, maybe, much more comfortable than the people that are working for in terms of content sharing, content liquidity, and content repurposing.
[8:50] I guess that would be something that probably both of us would give as a word of caution to someone entering the field, that someone’s comfort with living in the connected world may be encountering a department that’s not as digitally integrated and not as connected within its own organization. Some education, some patience, and some very private eye-rolling may be a good approach to encountering that.
[9:20] Does that make sense?


Henrik: [9:21] Yes, and there’s likely many of those.

David: [9:23] Yeah, I think so. I think it’s one of the things that it’s both exciting.
It can also be very frustrating for…I don’t want to say a generation before.
Newer employees who are used to just lightning-fast content sharing and have not encountered the fact that it took, what was it, 20 years to clear the DVD of the first season of “Saturday Night Live” because of the complexities of the rights situation. [9:57] I think that another one of the challenges is that it makes, with the technology that provides for rapid worldwide ease of access to assets, that the distance rights systems and governance systems have not nearly kept pace with this.
[10:15] Rights clearance and rights permissioning, and, in addition, the pricing models are far from mature about this. We’re sitting here in this conversation on the cusp of “The New York Times” having an interesting transition coming up with paywall with metered access to free content. Magazines, finding a new wealth of opportunity on subscription-based and display advertising-based revenue from tablets that didn’t exist a year ago.

Henrik: [10:51] Like “Wired”…

David: [10:54] Absolutely. We’re only seeing a handful of tablet-based magazines to talk about. It could be easy to come into a job and just assume everything’s been figured out about the economics of digital content and the rights that are “the crazy aunt in the basement,” [laughs] use that phrase or “the crazy uncle in the basement.” [11:22] We have a long ways to go on the econometrics of digital contentment and on the ease with which rights are, at this point, permitted because much more maturity is occurring in the negotiation stage than previously.

Henrik: [11:39] Thank you, David.

David: [11:40] Henrik, it’s always a delight to spend time with you and appreciate your contributions to maturing the field. Look forward to talking to you again.

Henrik: [11:49] For more on Digital Asset Management, log on to
anotherdamblog.com. Thanks again.

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Michael Hollitscher on Digital Asset Management

Michael Hollitscher discusses Digital Asset Management

 

 

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • Do you find yourself often closely linked with both the creative and technical side of your business?
  • You recently started a meetup group called NYC Digital Asset Managers. This has been quite successful in its first year. When did you first start this group?
  • What advice would you like to share with DAM Professionals and even people aspiring to become DAM Professionals?

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor: [0:01] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset
Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, I’m talking with Mike Hollitscher. Mike,
how are you?
Michael Hollitscher: [0:08] Good. How’s it going?
Henrik: [0:11] Good. How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Michael: [0:16] I am the manager of Digital Asset Management for a digital marketing
agency called Digitas. When I first started here, we were an independent
company, national in scope. In the past two or three years, we were purchased
by Publicis Groupe. We’ve become part of the global digital arm of, I think, the
third largest media and advertising company in the world now. [0:58] My job basically
revolves around trying to ingest and organize all of the digital assets that
we are creating and receiving from our clients.
[1:09] In addition to that, I’m also involved in a bunch of other technology issues,
just trying to see where we’re going for the future.
Henrik: [1:20] Do you find yourself often closely linked with both the creative
and the technical side of your business?
Michael: [1:25] Oh, absolutely. In the end, I end up being the liaison between
those two. Not only just creative, also our marketing people, our delivery
people, our creative…Really, when you get right down to it, DAM is much more
of a marketing tool than, I think, a creative tool. [1:48] I end up having to speak
both languages, the core group’s language and also, to a certain degree, IT. I’m
not an IT person. I’m still confused as an IT person all the time, but, basically, I
interface between those two groups quite a bit.
[2:08] That’s kind of where it comes in that I’m trying more to see where we’re
going and where the pain points are in our Digital Asset Management strategy
and just our content strategies at this point.
Henrik: [2:26] You recently started a meetup group called NYC Digital Asset
Managers. This has been quite successful in its first year. When did you first start
this group?
Michael: [2:35] I can’t really claim ownership of, say, starting the group. That
was really on Chad. Chad and I actually met at a Henry Stewart conference at
Davis. I believe it was two years ago now, and it’s interesting how it springs out
of, I think, a lot of people’s experiences going to Henry Stewart and various
DAM conferences over the last six or seven years. [3:03] I was actually presenting
on some of the strategies we’ve used to tag photo libraries, or other sort of
assets, with XMP metadata, and how we were looking to…Basically, our nuts and
bolts process, and then pushing it out, and where we’re going for the future.
Afterwards, Chad came up to me, and he was really excited because he was
basically doing the exact same stuff that I was.
[3:32] It just so turned out that we share a Digital Asset Management platform.
We use the same vendor. We also share an integrator. We had a great conversation,
and one of the things that’s always been interesting about going to DAM
conferences since…The first one I went to was probably in 2003 or 2004.
[3:54] It was just that back then, you were always working in this sort of vacuum,
and you’re flying blind a lot of times. Maybe you had an integrator, maybe you
didn’t. You talked to your vendor, but there wasn’t a good amount of standards,
and there weren’t really a lot of people to talk to. At that point, Henry Stewart
was the one time a year you could actually go somewhere and talk to people,
and not feel like you were absolutely, totally alone.
[4:31] We had shot emails back and forth, and Chad was interested in setting up
a meetup group, he mentioned. He said he started one, and he asked if I would
help out, and I was able to provide a few different ideas, and a few different
resources to really start it to get it going. After a while, I was basically billed as a
co-organizer.
[4:49] We’ve basically just been bouncing ideas back and forth to each other,
and coming up with good people to bring in, to present.
[4:59] I think it goes back to what I was saying about how it was six or seven
years ago, that it’s like…I think what we’re really providing is an opportunity for
people to come in and just actually have a chance to talk to other people in
their realm, in their field, because, in general, when you’re doing Digital Asset
Management, you’re the only guy there.
[5:24] Maybe you have some contacts with other people in your office, but there
really aren’t any other people who are sharing your experience.
[5:34] There’s just so much to pull in and there are so many different directions
you can go with it. It’s a very holistic career where you are looking at the entire
process of how your company is doing their work. Most people don’t. Your average
worker at a job is just like…They’re focused on their small part of the puzzle.
[6:02] I would say, without sounding maudlin, it can get a little lonely at certain
points where it’s like, “Who can I call upon? Where can I learn how to deal with
video assets better? How to set up a taxonomy? Who’s doing stuff that’s really
exciting and cool?”
[6:22] That’s really what we’re trying to provide, sort of a knowledge base. But
also because I’m finishing up a master’s at Pratt in library and information sciences,
one of the things I’ve been trying to do is a lot of outreach to other LIS
programs in our area.
[6:45] We’ve been getting a pretty fair amount of students coming in who, in
a field that is becoming vastly more digital. They can really start getting their
feet wet and get an idea of where everything’s going, whether this is a good
career choice.
[6:53] A lot of times, those are who the best ideas come from. We’re very egalitarian.
We’re looking…If you’re a member, you can present because we have a
lot of experts but we also have a lot of people, even if they’re just starting out.
They’ve come up with fantastic ideas or they have great internships. We’re looking
for knowledge from everybody in that way.
Henrik: [7:19] What advice would you share with other DAM professionals and
even people aspiring to become a DAM professional?
Michael: [7:26] That’s a good question because…It’s interesting how the whole
field, the space has changed because, again, if you’re going back to the early
part of the last decade, you could go around and ask 15 different people who
are managing a DAM how they ended up in that job. It was really like a company
bought a system and they looked around the room and looked at one
guy or one girl and said, “That person’s running it.” [7:58] Invariably, they came
from some print field, usually production or something like that. There are a
lot of people, like myself who were just thrown into the breach and they just
had to learn all the different aspects of how to make this happen, how to do it
on the fly.
[8:23] I’m cheering for the home team here, but I think having a library science
degree is a fantastic way to do it. It’s a great way to get a grounding in it but I
think it’s kind of a specific type of person, in a lot of ways, too.
[8:38] In the end, what we’re talking about is classification. Classification is,
again, another really holistic concept and it’s a very basic concept because it’s
like when…It’s so inherent in our human experience because the one thing all
humans do when they look at something…After they look at something, they
classify it. They put it in a particular box or a particular category.
[9:05] It’s really taking an organization’s assets and trying to…Not only to classify
it but also to figure out how they move and what are the best states for them to
move from. It’s a bunch of different complimentary, somewhat what’s the term
I’m looking for sometimes competing skill sets.
[9:29] Being able to be very granular but have that holistic sort of overarching,
big picture view at the same time. Having a lot of focus but also having to be
incredibly gregarious and willing to be very social and just always trying to find
a way to develop stuff in a new, different way. You have to be very patient and
very impatient at the same time.
[9:57] I would say it’s an interesting field to get into if you want to be the hub of
everything. If you have a lot of ideas about content and where the web is going
and where digital content is going, as well.
[10:19] I was reading a really interesting “Wired” article on the train coming in
about how we’re moving into more of an application model again, in terms of
the Internet with apps, with mobile. Everything is becoming little pieces rather
than the free, wide open web anymore.
[10:45] One of the things that got me thinking…This kind of goes back to the
whole of Jonathan Zittrain throughout the…We’re really going back into a
stage in computing that’s based around appliances again. That’s where DAM
fits in beautifully as, really, the content delivery device for all these different
applications.
[11:12] At the same time, what it really comes down to…You just have to be a very
good communicator, I think. Somebody who’s really willing to just roll up their
sleeves and try and iron out a problem that you’ll probably never completely
iron out because everything moves too quickly.
[11:34] You just really have to be willing to build as many bridges as possible and
love technology, but also hate it a little bit, too, in order to find where technology
stops and where culture starts and how to fix those culture issues, as well. I
think you’re building bridges not only through technology, but also through just
getting people to talk to each other.
[12:04] In the end, you’re more a personality type than you are somebody who
has a specific set of skills at the beginning of it.
Henrik: [12:15] That’s fair. Thank you, Mike.
Michael: [12:16] No problem.
Henrik: [12:18] For more on Digital Asset Management, log on to
anotherdamblog.com. Thanks again.

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