MM: You have more than your hands full just bringing your whole direct group into the system. Anything else on your wish list?

BG: Yes. Oh, a few other things that we are looking at including in the DAM workflow is being able to send someone or a vendor a collection of images, and them being be able to download them in bulk versus one at a time. Our vendors are getting 8 or 9 images at a time to retouch. It’d be nice if they didn’t have to download them file-by-file. Even though they have the high-speed file transfer with Aspera to make it fast, it would be nice to be able to download that folder in bulk. That’s something that we’re looking at developing now.

MM: We have just begun seeing that function in DAMs, staging and provisioning particular assets with its metadata and workflow information into a hot folder. At which point in time, when the vendor logs on, they see the stuff in their hot folder.

It looks like it’s a scripting function on the DAM side. But it uses a zipping or Stuff-it application, where it takes those high-resolution files and compresses them all into one nice package. That also seems to make it a little less prone to getting corrupted in the file transfer process.

BG: Not being the most technically savvy about all that, I don’t know if we need to do that, zip them up and put them into some “hot” folder. We create the folder in the DAM and then e-mail the link to the suppliers.

MM: It’s the same idea, but the point is that by putting all these assets in a folder and zipping it into a package, you’ve reduced the size of the package considerably, and you’ve also done essentially the bulk transfer in terms of being able to move 5 or 6 or 10 really large files economically in one transaction or one interaction.

BG: I wouldn’t even think about that kind of integrated technology. I know that Industrial Color is fantastic. I think they would probably already be looking at that if it were going to make the GLOBALedit system full proof and not lose data. I’m sure that they’d be zipping that up.

MM: In the grand scheme of things, it’s a pretty trivial technical problem to solve. They should probably have an easy fix to that.

BG: Ok, good. Some further challenges for the having an integrated DAM with the Direct Channel is if there is an image we both used. Let’s say we picked up from their photo shoot, then we would have different image rights usage for that one image. Usage rights for the Direct Channel may be 6 months, and we may only buy it for 2 months. So now, what do we put in the metadata as the expiration date? Can the metadata track on two levels? Which one is it going to refer to when it expires an image? I don’t even think we know how to tackle that yet.

MM: There are a couple ways you can approach that. You can do it with the facilities of a DAM—to manage multi-class permissions. Or you can then say, “Look. Let’s have the DAM do what it’s really supposed to, which is manage metadata and the workflow.”

We’ll bring in a policy server such as the Adobe LiveCycle or other sorts of policy servers, and that will be the way by which we will be able to link an asset to a policy library or a policy server. Depending on who’s touching the asset, there will be a policy in place to then tell them exactly what they can or can’t do.

Again, while it may not necessarily be cheap, it’s a fairly straightforward, easy thing to do. Especially if you’re already using the XMP. Because XMP will have the ability to put embedded links in it. Specifically an embedded link back to a policy server.

So while conceptually it looms large on your horizon, from a technology perspective, it’s a fairly straightforward integration. It’s a “Do it now—get it done,” sort of thing.

BG: Fantastic. Up until now I have kept this project under the radar and didn’t have to invest a lot of money in developing the DAM, buying software, etc. I want to try to keep it that way for now so I will see if we can figure out something within GLOBALedit or come up with a new internal process between VICTORIA’S SECRET and Victoria’s Secret Direct.

If you say this policy server is quite expensive…

MM: You could rent it, as well. There are ways. The technology is called a “policy server.” There are lots of different ways to get it into your organization. Including going back to your organization Industrial Color, and saying, “Hey—I need a policy server. Go get one, and I’ll rent it from you.”

BG: Exactly. There’s a creative way. Thank you!

MM: Yes.

MM: We have seen other DAMs in similar businesses using what we’ve called an ROI dashboard. People log onto it and there’s a little admin panel. It basically says, “Here is the total volume,” to-date, year-to-date or whatever. “We estimate that it eliminated 595 DVDs at a fully-burdened cost of $74.00 to burn and ship and receive.” The data summarizes year-to-date savings: x-amount of money or x-number of hours in reworking or redoing preexisting pieces that they couldn’t find. This would’ve been based on historical baseline information that you would’ve gotten prior to deploying the system.

BG: Prior to moving forward I worked up a return on investment, obviously, to sell it to my boss—so that I could embark on this venture. Although our main goal at the onset was for protection of assets, a library that held everything and was accessible to finding images for layouts, etc. However, I did think that it would save designers time and I wanted to put a value to it. After asking several people throughout the firm how much time they spent tracking down hard-drives, looking at web-native systems we came up with about a fifth of their time each week was spent searching for images. This was the case for many people in the company. So if it were a 50-hour week, maybe 10 hours a week could be saved.

I also put a cost savings to the many downloads that we get charged for from vendors and FedEx shipments which probably end up being $350,000 a year in savings.

MM: As you begin to look at some of the baseline data that you gathered to build your business case, that will probably help inform what kind of reports you’d like to have on an ongoing basis.

BG: Yes, agree.

MM: One of the other things that we’ve learned from other people in situations similar to yourself is setting up departmental benchmarks. In terms of basic asset reuse as well as who creates more reusable stuff as opposed to less reusable stuff. It’s just simply a report card for your asset creator communities, in terms of who creates the more reusable stuff. That kind of starts to set up a game to create more reusable stuff.

In some cases, we’ve seen companies put incentives in place for asset creators to want to create more reusable stuff as a function of how they do layers and PhotoShop files or Illustrator files. How well they’ve done meta-tagging, et cetera.

As you were talking about some of the technologies that you really appreciated in a state of the art DAM platform, you’d mentioned the XMP metadata piece. The flexible user interface. The high-speed data transfer and the reporting functions. Were there any other features of a DAM system that you wanted to have?

BG: I think the workflow capabilities were something always in the back of my mind. A couple of the vendors that I looked at had workflow capabilities built in, but it wasn’t my initial criteria for going out and embarking to build an image library. If they had workflow services, it was a plus.

AS: DAM customers are increasingly realizing that having a secure yet accessible content archive is only a first step. There is a growing premium connected to the availability of integrated tools and services that drive and optimize key workflows. [NOTE: Andrew Salop joins this interview. As a consultant, he worked with BJ Gray in implementing the DAM at Victoria's Secret]

MM: It probably also keeps track of who transferred what to whom, by time of day and user ID?

BG: I don’t think Aspera does. I think that’s just a total high-speed highway. But the tracking of images is available in our DAM workflow system. That’s something that I wanted.

Actually, that brings up a good point. A lot of the systems that I was looking at did not have different reporting formats. They only had one way to pull the reports, and only one kind of report you could pull. I wanted a system that I could pull reports by user, by image and by day and hour and week. To get how many terabytes or megabytes were being transferred. Instantaneously, I wanted to be able to pull reports. Who was using it the most? Who am I saving the most time for? So I could report back to the executives about what kind of return on investment we were getting. I really wanted a robust reporting-and-tracking system.

MM: So they gave you a really robust reporting and query system that allowed you to correlate and collate various aspects of the activity journal into higher-level business information. You’re saying that was part of the system? Or was that added to the system, but they integrated it for you?

BG: You know, I really can’t remember what was offered at the onset. We started exploring all the needs for the system in such an organic way that part of the reports were theirs and some were my vision.

MM: How does management use the information that they’re getting from your reports?

BG: Because we just turned it on in February and we just on-boarded 68 users to the system, we’re very much in the infancy stage of making sense of all the reports. I’m just pulling the reports to see how many people are on the system at this point, accessing it and figure out how many assets they are actually downloading. We have so many different teams in the enterprise that are using this system. Which ones are really using it the most and finding efficiencies with their time?

Right now, I’m more curious to see how this adds up as far as expense on a weekly and monthly basis. So right now, it’s really high-level—just getting the information out of it.

MM: Right. That means that they had a system that was flexible enough to accommodate your evolving set of requirements and needs? What other criteria did you use in selecting a vendor?

BG: That their interface be user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing to the creative eye—and as I say—”Apple-esque.” It’s a very creative atmosphere, here. If you put some really boring software enterprise solution in front of these designers, they’re not going to want to use it. You want these designers to try the system and see how easy it was. So I really wanted a cool interface.

AS: This is an important point. There is a direct connection in creative environments between user-interface and system utilization. Enterprise solutions seeking to expand into media content workflows will need to place a higher priority into improving the state of their system’s usability. [NOTE: Andrew Salop joins this interview. As a consultant, he worked with BJ Gray in implementing the DAM at Victoria's Secret]

BG: I also wanted a company that was using the latest and greatest technology out there to build their DAM application so that we weren’t always a step behind of what was being offered by others. Like high-speed file transfer, etc. I wanted a company that was on the cutting edge of their industry.