DAM, MAM, Workflow Management…What’s That?

Image credit: TXT Polymedia

You probably don’t spend your time thinking about how DAM (digital asset management), MAM (media asset management) or Web Workflow (pretty much what it sounds like) fit into your media business, but you should.

(MAM is the more appropriate term here, as it’s mainly concerned with audio, video and other media content.)

Each technology aims to make sense of how to deal with quickly growing digital content (Twenty-four hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute), or finding ways to use software to support and supervise the things you do in your company.

Now it might not be too apparent why I’m talking about MAM and workflow management together. But both of these terms seek to use computers, software and some basically simple templates to add order to that unruly proliferation of media, or figure out how computers can help run your business in a smoother, more coherent fashion to save you time and money.

This first article only introduces what will be an ongoing series to help make sense of these important technologies. Although I’m be taking most of my examples from Fortune 500-level companies (they use MAM systems that begin pricing at $50,000), don’t think this is just an academic exercise—like most everything in our digital age, the software behind these technologies will be making their way to you sooner than you may think.

Along the way I’ll be talking about some of the cool concepts I discovered at the recent Henry Stewart DAM conference in New York, as well as what companies like Ceiton (recently in town, A&E tapped them for a cool workflow app) can tell us about how we can be smarter in using web-based technologies to manage our companies.

Please stay tuned. If you think of any issues or companies you’ve heard of that might be relevant, let me know (dan [at] nycppnews.com) and I’ll be happy to investigate.