NEW - Digital Directions: Your Digital DNA

This shift has been caused by digital distribution—both the distribution of salable electronic content, as well as the dissemination of content to support online marketing programs through search engines. These activities are neither optional nor speculative, and they require us to manage digital assets in a systematic way.

The question remains: To what degree do our organizations need to change in order to meet this new requirement for managing our digital content?

Perhaps very little. There are no shortage of service providers available to handle every aspect of the creation, stewardship and distribution of digital content. Digital asset management and digital asset distribution partners provide key benefits:

• economies of scale

• reduction of time to market

• technical and process expertise.

Perhaps we can handle the asset-management function with relatively little organizational disruption. Perhaps we can simply have our digital files sent from the book compositor to an asset-management service provider, who will maintain these assets, perform any necessary transformations upon these files, and transmit them to the appropriate channel partners.

Our world unfortunately is rarely as tidy as we would like.

When determining an outsourcing approach, organizations need to review the tasks involved and decide which tasks are among core functions and which are not.

Core functions are those in which we add particular value, and our ability to do so may differentiate us from our competitors. Core functions are our focus and should be done in-house.

Non-core functions are those that are outside our focus, are commodity activities, and are not areas of competitive differentiation. Non-core functions should be assigned to service partners.

Clearly some functions are not core to publishing organizations, such as setting up a server farm for digital file storage. But there are many aspects of digital asset management that are core functions and need to be done in-house: