At last week's Henry Stewart Briefing on Digital Asset Management in Toronto (there is another in Dallas on March 16), a prevailing theme among enterprise customers was that all believed that they were still in the early stages of truly managing their digital assets. It seems many enterprises are still in the same position as they were several years ago when it came to managing image, audio, and video assets.

The question that arose at the end of the day was, "what is it going to take for Digital Asset Management (and related technologies) to match the adoption of Enterprise Content Management and Web Content Management today?"

There are a variety of reasons for why DAM will finally become a priority. I'm afraid one such reason is legal action. Like many things in life, people don't take things seriously until they get in trouble. We have seen many cases where litigation has spawned action to manage e-mails, records, documents, and even web content. With the explosion of digital media within enterprises, the chances that pertinent evidence resides in an audio, video, or image file is greater and greater. If you were sued, would you be able to search through all of your digital assets to find relevant evidence?

Among a variety of functionalities, the need to respond to litigation will undoubtedly challenge a DAM system's capabilities with regards to metadata, search, and rights management. As readers of the Digital Asset Management Report know, digital rights management in particular remains a weak point among most of the products we cover. Litigation will likely cause buyers to demand better rights management in the near future. Unfortunately for some, their current systems are not going to suffice as presently implemented.

Even if you are managing digital assets in your enterprise, are you prepared to put a formal "hold" on the assets in the system? Does your e-discovery technology integrate with your DAM system? As students of our E-Discovery online education course know, e-discovery can be expensive, time-consuming, and painful when dealing with something as seemingly simple as e-mails. It is much more difficult when the smoking gun is embedded in some video.

It's time for enterprises to get serious about properly managing their digital assets just like they are (or should be) doing with other enterprise content.