How relevant are interoperable DAM/CMS in Media?

Courtesy: www.synaptop.com

I came across an interesting article about the interoperability of DAM products on cmswire today. Be it DAM or CMS, the concept of interoperability is relatively new but highly beneficial across industries. Interoperability is the ability of these systems to interact with other third party/in-house DAM/CMS or other enterprise products (such as SAP, Oracle etc.) to share assets. This process can help save on costs of purchasing connectors, developing plug-ins and/or migrating content. This efficiency is typically obtained through the adoption of standards such as Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS), Open Data protocol (oData) etc. These protocols act as an overlying layer/API to allow access across systems to linked assets, metadata etc. For metadata another popular standard is used- Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OA-IPMH)

Interoperability can be a boon for most Media Conglomerates. Publishers owning multiple newspaper properties (national, regional and/or global) or Studios/Broadcasters having various Televisions, Radio and Studio assets can use this concept in multiple ways to optimize efficiency across the digital/content asset enterprise.

Take for example a Broadcaster having many channels as well as online properties. More often than not, different DAM systems are used to manage digital assets for each channel depending on their needs (Production or Archive DAM) and allocated IT budgets. A lot of investment has already gone into the Infrastructure; instead of looking to centralize the DAM with yet another enterprise DAM product as most businesses usually do; building in interoperability between the existing systems will prove more beneficial. Content such as news, advertisements, episodes, movies etc. can be shared across the channels. In addition a unique identifier can be assigned to each asset that will act as a primary key across the enterprise and can be the indicator for linking assets for this initiative.

In the case of Publishers, news, article, advertisements, editorial content, CRM and subscription data can be shared across newspaper and magazine properties within the enterprise. Linking subscription and CRM content across newspapers can help give a holistic view of the Conglomerate’s customer base and any user feedback can be used across the enterprise in the Editorial without much investment.

Across Media, creation of asset registries and linking them using Interoperability would help restrict copyright violations by the sharing licensing information across teams and units. Linking of metadata through the assets can also lead to a consistent metadata model falling in place; something most businesses are trying to implement across their enterprise. Benefits of Interoperability are many however the concept is yet to reach a level of maturity and stability that is required for it to be implemented. As of now CMIS is supported by IBM, Microsoft, SAP, BEA/Oracle, EMC, Open Text, Alfresco and Fatwire among others.

A mechanism worth adopting; it would be interesting to see how Media companies go about it.