Improving DAM In 2017: The Expanding Universe Of Digital Assets
Medhat Mahmoud has contributed an article to our Improving DAM In 2017 series with the title Digital Assets From IoT To Blockchain Will Become Everyone’s Business. The piece is about how the range of uses the digital assets is expanding exponentially:
“The fast pace of today’s evolving technologies, falling hardware costs, wireless ultra speed advancement like 5G, heavy investment in IoT, shrinking power requirements for devices and sensors and advancement in technologies like Artificial intelligence, machine learning, combined with new set of protocols like Blockchain, are all moving very fast and enabling the creation of exponentially increasing amounts of data which can be transformed into value through the medium of digital assets.” [Read More]
This article follows on from his other item for CIO Review which I discussed last month. This encapsulates a lot of similar ideas I have had also about DAM (along with some others, it should be noted). I am not entirely sure that all of the implications of this increasing role of digital assets will be completely positive for all parties (especially in respect of the use of private medical data and who benefits commercially from access to this resource) but the fact that these are under discussion and becoming points of debate indicates that their significance is increasing. If digital assets are topics that have potential political implications, it means they are already important, i.e. they have value right now in 2017, not at some indeterminable date in the future.
One clear point that emerges from Medhat’s article is that digital assets have a more universal role than a lot of people active in the current DAM market understand it. In fact, it could be said that most ‘conventional’ DAM professionals have only considered the subject from the perspective of content (and mostly of a marketing-oriented nature) because that is where demand has been highest so far. This substantially underestimates the value of digital assets as a model for representing enterprise value (and its subsequent transfer between customers, suppliers and partners).
It is telling that someone from outside the conventional digital asset management field has needed to point all this out and that so much of the market remains excessively introspective and unable to see the wood for the trees in terms of their ambitions for the platforms which they earn their living from. I suspect this situation is going to slowly unwind over the next few years as interest in the field widens and the existing participants are obliged to think more deeply about what it is they offer in order to remain relevant (and competitive). It is less that definition of digital assets has changed, more that stakeholders in the DAM industry need to see the bigger picture and properly appreciate the depth and sophistication of the concept.
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