that would go away if you only had a Digital Asset Management system.
1. YOU FIND YOURSELF NOT MANAGING ASSETS AS MUCH AS HUNTING THEM DOWN: Your assets are spread throughout various computers, drives, CDs, within different school departments and offices.
2. YOU’RE MISPLACING STUFF: You just spent hours looking for the pictures of the president during alumni weekend and they are nowhere to be found. You know they exist but now you are backtracking to see if they are still on the photographer’s camera, sitting on someone’s desktop, or dropped in the wrong folder on the server. Without proper metadata it is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
3. ONCE AN ASSET IS LOST, YOU HAVE TO ATTEMPT TO TRY AND REPLACE IT: Hopefully the missing asset is not tied to a past school event or function which now makes recreating it impossible.
4. YOU ARE THE DIGITAL TRAFFIC COP: Faculty and department heads are phoning or emailing you all day long looking for you to locate digital assets, convert file formats, or track down missing assets they need for deadlines. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could login to a system and do this on their own?
5. YOU’RE INEFFICENT DUE TO MANUAL PROCESSES: Several school departments, offices, or faculty need access to the assets. They see you as the bottleneck.
6. THERE IS NO CONSISTENT METHOD IN THE SHARING OF ASSETS: One department in the college wants you to drop assets they request to a FTP, another has a dropbox account and then there is the more time consuming request of burning data to media. Wouldn’t it be easier to give access to the data instead of managing a dozen or so delivery methods?
7. YOU ARE BECOMING A DIGITAL MAILROOM: You are spending a lot of time and money burning and mailing DVDs of data.
8. THE WRONG STUFF ENDS UP IN THE WRONG PLACES: The wrong digital version of the student handbook was sent to the printer and now you are being blamed for the additional printing cost.
9. YOU HAVE SINGLE POINTS OF FAILURE IN YOUR PROCESS: You are concerned the cleaning crew or new student intern will spill something, kick, or pull the plug on your computer and you will lose everything.
10. YOU ARE THE PSEUDO DIGITAL ASSET MANAGEMENT SYSTEM, AND THE WHOLE PROCESS STOPS WHEN YOU ARE ON VACATION OR AT A SPECIAL EVENT: Wouldn’t it be nice to not take phone calls on your down time away from the school? MerlinOne Digital Asset Management will set you free!
If we missed anything we would enjoy your comments in adding to the list.