Brother, can you share your content?

A woman's hand rose in the audience. "But what if you can't get your colleagues to share their content. How do you make them do it?" It wasn't the first time I had heard the question -- God knows I said it to myself often enough when I was running the interactive division of a media group in trying to get a feed from one of our two daily papers -- in a format we could use.

With all the discussions on digital asset management, the theorists often leave unmentioned the largest obstacle of all: internal politics. While I don't have numbers on how wide-spread it is, I do know that when I re-asked woman's question to the audience about whether they had dealt with this issue -- they were nodding and raising their hands. And while on a call on Friday with my co-panelists at the upcoming Create-a-Sphere symposium I suggested this as an obstacle --- and everyone chimed in, in agreement.

Like the filibuster option in politics, it seems the minority can just say no to sharing content -- and what are beleaguered colleagues to do? Running to the board and saying that so-and-so won't play nicely would certainly qualify as a CLM. But board members and senior management alike that don't provide tools and policies to thwart this very toxic power play ... will end up with the same disastrous stalemate seen today in government. Line managers won't complain they just won't get the job done. And the entropy can be costly.

According to the Butler Group, up to 10% of staff productivity is lost trying to find things.  And searching for something that you know should be there -- but just can't find is probably the biggest time waster of all. More recent research from IDC supports that and notes that a company that employs 1,000 information workers can expect more than $5 million in annual salary costs to go down the drain because of the time wasted looking for information and not finding it.

Is there a Holy Grail to this? Yes, and it begins at the top of the food chain. The C-suite needs to acknowledge that knowledge is power -- and therefore some people don't want to share. (And your most powerful managers -- may be your worst offenders.) Creating a Lord of the Flies environment is not the answer. Some people may thrive in that environment but the majority don't; they will either begrudgingly go along (and go without) or quit.  Instead there needs to be an enterprise-wide initiative to invest in technology that automates processes -- to neutralize the human gate-keeper. These technologies fall under the heading of DAM - digital asset management solutions -- but also are known more narrowly as BAM (brand asset management) and MAM (multimedia asset management) and sometimes more broadly as ECM (enterprise content management).

Technologies vary depending upon 

• the types of assets being stored -- largely text, photos, videos?  
  
• the frequency of searching for them -- everyday or once in a while? 
• the applications -- recombination and repurpose, or e-discovery?

These technologies need to be embedded enterprise wide into the workflow. Techniques include automating the ingestion of all assets into a single repository -- either physically or virtually and creating a method to standardize metadata (I'll dive into that topic on another day.)

A sane digital asset management solution eliminates the insanity of having employees dropping to bended knee saying "please sir, can you share your content?"