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.