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: What would’ve been some of the cutting-edge technologies that you wanted to make sure this provider or vendor incorporated in their offering?

BG: One would be that they were using XMP. Building their system with XMP, so that it was open to connect with other systems.

MM: XMP meaning the Extensible Metadata Platform and an open standard championed by Adobe? That’s a way of capturing metadata and putting it into the actual file. So when the file or asset leaves the repository, the metadata travels with it.

BG: Correct. I am not a tech person but I also understand that if it’s built on XMP—and that if another system I have here is built on XMP, it’s an open interface for us to try to figure out how to link them together if they need to share information with each other, maybe link them by project number, or by file number.

AS: Thereby enhancing workflow connectivity by supplementing, or possibly even substituting system integration with file-based metadata interchange. [NOTE: Andrew Salop joins this interview. As a consultant, he worked with BJ Gray in implementing the DAM at Victoria's Secret]

MM: So we’re not just talking about being about to send a file—an asset—from one system to another. XMP also provided the basic architecture for two systems to share metadata and assets in some sort of collaborative or reciprocal process. What other technology did you want to have in terms of considering a state of the art platform?

BG: XMP encompasses part of what is needed for the metadata but the other part was a company that was developing flexibility with the metadata schema. Metadata drives what we are doing, drives the rules of how our system works based on detailed (loaded) search capabilities and image rights expiration. All the importance is in the metadata so we needed to be able to have lots of functionality when updating, changing or viewing the metadata.

The high-speed file transfer technology came about while I was working with the company. I did not think of needing it up front but now I can’t imagine not having it. High Speed file transfer is a huge, huge plus.

MM: Tell us a little bit more about that.

BG: It’s developed by a vendor called Aspera and partner with the company that built our DAM which is Industrial Color. The DAM application is called GLOBALedit. Using Aspera allows the images to upload or download in minutes or seconds versus hours. Like using an FTP site, a big image from an FTP site could take a long time to pull down, and hold up someone’s computer. Aspera’s high-speed file transfer makes images down or upload super fast. It saves so much time on the vendor’s side when they pull massive amounts of images down for retouching or printing. It’s just incredible. An example would be 1 GB file downloads in about 7 seconds with a 20Mbps connection. So it’s really, really fast.

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.

MM: Then you said, “Okay. Let’s go find vendors, then, who can automate this new idealized workflow.”

TM: Yes. Well, you know, a lot of that was going on simultaneously, too. By then, I knew who the vendors were.

MM: Right.

TM: Yes.

MM: As I recall, you started off with 15 or so vendors, in terms of your not short-list, but your medium-list. Right?

TM: Right. So I probably looked at 100, and we cut it down to 15 for a more thorough review.

MM: At that point, as I recall, you brought them in and showed them the current and future states. You asked them to speak to how they would automate the future state. Is that right?

TM: We only brought in four. We sat them down in the room after they gave their presentation. We set them down in the room and said, “Okay. Here’s our flow. Now we’re going to leave you here for a while. When we come back, we want you to present to us how you can affect our flow.” So we really put them on the spot.

MM: Not just “affect our flow,” but implement it.

TM: Implement your solution. How is your solution going to integrate with our flow?

MM: So what came out of that?

TM: Well, some things that we were able to gauge. To say, “These people are telling us the truth. These people speak our language and understand what we do. These people are not trying to fit a round peg into a square hole.”

For instance, one group would say, “Oh, yes. We can do all of that. We’ll just make it work.” That’s not what we wanted to hear. We wanted to hear the truth.

One person would say, “You know what? You’ve got a pretty good solution here. We can automate this and automate this and automate this. We’re not sure about this automation here. You may have to keep this as a manual process for a while, until a new version comes out. Or we can implement it as a part of our software.”

Then there were people that would talk about heuristic attitudes and speak a different language. We knew that they didn’t understand the catalog business. So when we started talking to people that not only talked our language and understood what product groupings and SKUs were—and making sure that there was an image that could be saved in a directory as a JPG and the high-res image in a similar place. We understood that they knew what they were talking about.

So it was almost an interview, as well.

MM: Yes. And then you selected a vendor.

TM: Well, we actually went through two stages of that. We had them back to. We actually took some partial data and then presented to us. We cut it down to two, then, after the four. Then each of those two came back and presented to us with our data.