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Digital Asset Management

Buzzle Staff
Digital asset management is a set of activities associated with the storage, utilization, and retrieval of digital resources to maximize returns, with minimum investment cost.
As business processes become more and more complex, with employees, work, and workflow spread all over the globe, managing data and records can no longer be a manual process. It only makes sense that data is recorded and stored in digital form.
Digital asset management involves storing data in digital form. In technical terms, a digital asset is any form of media that has been turned into a binary source. This may include PowerPoint presentations, spreadsheets, research and operations data, programming code, text documents, videos, logos, and photos etc.

Importance

The importance of digital asset management can be gauged from the fact that it not only involves storing data in easily understandable formats, but also that the management software, apart from storing and classifying data, comes with additional features of analyzing it, thereby ensuring conducive business decisions, taken at the right time.
This means that you can study existing projects and reuse valuable assets from them. This also means faster development, because the groundwork that had been done already, ensures that people can concentrate on the requirements of the rest of the project.
If data is managed manually, there may be situations, when the company does not even realize that it has certain assets in its inventory, that have been 'forgotten' because of not being used over a period of time. So, for an asset to be truly useful, it is not only important that people have it, but also that they find it and utilize it, when the needed.

Research

Research has shown that management in digital form saves both time and money. This means that skilled professionals do not have to spend time searching for data that can be located in centralized data repositories and accessed through the company's intranet.
When one keeps track of important information regarding one's assets, they can be properly accounted for. This includes the services that are employed, cost of utilizing them, available software designed to manage assets, and even the qualifications of certified advisers.

Planning

Managing assets digitally, involves a number of processes, which are all designed to increase the productivity of companies or individuals. Its services include planning, procurement, accounting for daily operating costs through disposal, tracking physical location of these assets, and accounting tasks such as amortization and depreciation.
This type of asset management also establishes contact with suppliers, which makes it easier for companies to communicate with these suppliers for service, warranties, and replacement.
Although asset management has been around for some time now, its popularity among industries has only been apparent in the last few years.