At Topdown, we don’t make a digital asset management (DAM) solution. But since we do make customer communications management (CCM) solutions, and CCM software needs access to digital assets to function, we spend a lot of time thinking about DAM-related issues. As we develop our next generation of CCM software, we see the need to address DAM in three categories: classic enterprise content management (ECM), traditional DAM, and parts of documents. This article looks at those three categories, and at how to get the most out of them today and in the future.

Interoperability, or the ability to share and manage information between systems within and across an organization, is critically important to business success, but many existing digital asset management (DAM) solutions fail to adequately address the need. Moreover, most organizations have (often many) more than three asset management systems, making DAM interoperability a high priority. Ralph Windsor sums up the problem better than I ever could: “The DAM industry is guilty of self-obsessed and narcissistic behavior or (at best) an apathetic and fatalistic attitude that assumes interoperability is someone else's problem which might never get solved anyway….Meanwhile, the ongoing DAM interoperability crisis smolders away and users whose assets are sourced from another system (whether another DAM or a different class of enterprise application entirely) continue to grapple with complex and expensive custom integration projects that try to fill a void which should be occupied by a definitive industry-wide standard.” So what’s to be done? The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) is on it. They’ve established Technical Committees to assess the problem and offer solutions. Beginning with CMIS and proceeding to CMIS4DAM, the OASIS standards community has been working to define how enterprise content management (ECM) and DAM solutions should work together.

In “Digital Asset Management: Solution or Part of the CX Problem?” I discussed why an end-to-end customer experience management software solution that could serve marketing, operations, sales, customer service, human resources, accounting and more doesn’t exist – and perhaps shouldn’t: “Because tools made to serve a very specific purpose, created by people who specialize in that purpose and are passionate about really doing a limited number of things very well, are always better at solving a particular problem than a tool set meant to be everything to everyone. Invariably, tool sets that try to be everything to everyone have severe weaknesses in one or more functions that are outside the core competencies of the original core business problem(s) the software set out to solve.” So, instead of looking for a nonexistent comprehensive solution, the answer is to build your own custom digital experience delivery (DXD) system out of the best solutions available.

When you send out customer communications, do you ever need to attach a cover letter? Send a carbon copy (cc) or modified correspondence to a different recipient? Include attachments? Send follow-up communications? What about sending the same communication to different people via different delivery channels? If you’re in the insurance or other industry that requires a great deal of transaction-related correspondence to multiple concerned parties – like sending a claim notification to the insured, the provider, and the policy holder – then you answered “yes” to both. That means you need customer communications management (CCM) software that gives you versatility and complete control over electronic cover letters. Not all CCM solutions offer the same level of control, so be sure to ask about that in particular before you decide which CCM solution is best for you.

In the age of digital-first omnichannel communications, do companies still need a correspondence management system? Yep, they sure do. Despite much chatter to the contrary, the death of print is not yet upon us – at least not in the realm of customer communications management. In fact, our clients, many of whom operate in heavily regulated industries such as health care, financial services, and utilities, tell us that somewhere around 70 percent of their customer-facing communications are still printed and mailed as opposed to being delivered digitally.

The term “digital first” originated in the news publishing industry a few years ago as a reaction to the rapid growth of online news consumption and the expectation that the death of print was imminent. To survive, journalists had to adapt, and quickly, to an increasingly digital world. They had to publish with the expectation that readers would encounter their news online, and probably on mobile devices, and maybe even in 140 characters or fewer. It was no longer enough to create a print edition and just republish it online. They had to learn to create and present their content for digital consumption first, which was a sea change for decades- or even centuries-old print publishers.