As adults, we’ve all been around computers long enough to know what the term “digital” means. We’ve also been dealing with money long enough to understand the nature of an asset. Put those two terms together under “digital assets,” though, and most people’s eyes start to mist over. Ask them to define “digital assets” and you’ll most likely get a blank stare.
However, whether we know it or not, most of us own countless digital assets. In most cases, those digital assets were acquired for some long-forgotten task and now lie dormant on our company’s hard drives, CDs, and servers…effectively collecting digital dust. Little do we know that in those obscure warehouses of the computer world lies a treasure trove of value just waiting to come in handy once more.
Before entering the What If those assets are reused, it may be worthwhile to more clearly define the nature of a digital asset. In essence, digital assets are assets that your business holds in digital form. How’s that for stating the obvious? Seriously though, it doesn’t have to be more complicated than that. In their truest form, digital assets are files and raw collections of data that your business owns and that you have the legal right to use internally or sell or rent to a third party. This includes information from databases, intellectual property, transactional data, multimedia content and any other digital information of value.
Notice I said, “…of value.” Not all pieces of digital “stuff” qualify as assets. In fact, much of what can initially be considered a digital asset is, upon closer inspection, actually a digital liability.
So the first step to repurposing your digital assets is the unenviable task of separating the wheat from the chaff, the good from the bad, the useful from the useless, and the valuable from the worthless. In effect, finding and cataloging potential assets and throwing the rest away. Doing this is nothing short of arduous and daunting, but unless someone has the wisdom to effectively catalog your company’s data warehouses from the ground up, you’ll have no choice but to do it the hard way. Depending on the size of your company, this could be done in a day by the office administrator or be a year-long project for several members of your IT staff.
Fortunately, there are dozens of software packages designed to help you retrieve, catalog, and access this data. A little research online will produce a variety of products that will suit just about any digital asset management need.
As this data is reviewed and catalogued, it is probably wise to continue to ask this key question: Does it have any potential value to us or to someone else? If the answer is yes, save it and catalog it. Otherwise, throw it away.
Once this task is complete, you should have a pretty good idea of what digital assets your company has. The next step is to put them to good use to strengthen the final result. As mentioned above, these assets will be useful in one of three ways: to sell, rent, or use internally.
Once again, review the data you’ve cataloged and sort it by sale, rental, or internal use. For those you can sell or rent, such as customer data, do your research and approach companies that may be interested in your data. If they don’t want it, chances are they know someone who does. With a little luck and a bit of effort, you could potentially turn that dusty old data into a solid contribution to the bottom line.
For those elements that have an internal value, such as graphic and photographic archives, your task becomes communication, knowledge and ease of access. In other words, you need to educate people in your company about what digital assets exist, where they can be found, and how to easily retrieve them. There is no easy answer to What to do this, but it is essential that it happen. Otherwise, your hard-earned assets will once again retreat to the dark warehouses of the computer world from whence they came.
This brings us to the last key step in reusing your company’s digital assets: preservation and maintenance. Now that you have a complete library and catalog of the assets on hand, it would be ridiculous not to continue adding new assets to the collection as they become available. It would also be prudent to remove those assets that no longer have value to the company. The idea is to keep your asset library clean, relevant, and easily accessible.
The obvious, though often overlooked, positive attribute of digital assets vs. tangible assets is their timeless durability. If handled properly, the digital photo you catalog today will look no different in this year’s Annual Report than it will on the wall of your company’s corporate office on the Moon 50 years from now.
So take the time now to collect, categorize, and catalog those assets today. Years from now, you and many others will be very glad you did.