vi-91: developing a digital asset management system to ...€¦ · 8th largest u.s. construction...

VI-91: Developing a

Digital Asset Management

System to Work with

Vision

Ed Biebel, Vice President for Business

Applications at Hill International

©2016 Deltek, Inc. All Rights Reserved 2

About Hill International

8th largest U.S. Construction Management firm as

ranked by Engineering News-Record (ENR) magazine

Largest Construction Claims group in the world

based on number of consultants

4500 employees in 100 offices worldwide


What are we going to talk about today?

Digital Assets

– What are they?

– Why are they important?

Managing digital assets

– Why do we need to manage them?

– How is this going to become increasingly challenging?

Digital Asset Management systems

– What is it?

– What should it do?

Developing a Digital Asset Management system

– The benefit of CRM

Hill’s Experience / Case Study

Questions

Digital AssetsMore than just memories!



What Are Digital Assets?

Definition: A digital asset in essence is anything that exists in a binary format and

comes with the right to use. Files that do not possess the aforementioned right are not

considered assets. Digital assets are classified

as images, multimedia and textual content files.

-van Niekerk, A.J. (2006) The Strategic Management of Media Assets; A Methodological Approach. Allied Academies, New

Orleans Congress, 2006

More Simply: DIGITAL ASSETS = DATA (in files) + CONTEXT (in the form of

metadata)

Many people understand the first part – the digital assets – but lose sight of the critical

second part – the context – this is a critical problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_file

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_Academies


Why Are Digital Assets Important?

We are becoming a more visual world

– YouTube passes 4 billion video views daily

– Pinterest is the 4th largest driver of traffic worldwide

– Instagram passed Twitter in August 2012 with the number of active users

This is partially driven by Smartphones

– “As more people engage with social media via smartphones, they're discovering

that taking a picture "on the go" using a high-resolution phone is much less

tedious than typing out a status update on a two-inch keyboard.”

-- Fast Company, The Rise of Visual Social Media


A/E/C Industry Not Immune From This Change

Proposals are becoming more visual and photo driven

High quality photography is no longer a nice “add-on” but an expectation on

proposals

Also critical for public relations as photos can be fundamental to a good

story.

“Progress Photos are the Ultimate Expert Witness”– “Nothing resolves a dispute quicker than supporting (or disputing) the claim with proof of the facts, and nothing

establishes factual proof better than photographs.”


Photography Critical in Other Areas as Well

“Progress Photos are the Ultimate Expert Witness”– “Nothing resolves a dispute quicker than supporting (or disputing) the claim with proof of the facts, and nothing establishes

factual proof better than photographs.”

Best record of job progress

In claims situations, photos verify the site conditions at the time of construction as well

as prior site conditions.

Photography can show cause-and-effect relationships of changes.

- ConstructionPro Week, Volume: 4 - Issue: 4 - 01/30/2015 Construction Photography Best Practice: Progress Photos –

The Ultimate Expert Witness


Ease of Photography Brings New Challenges

The smartphone is also to blame here: everyone has a

camera in their pocket

InfoTrends estimates over 1 trillion photos were captured

worldwide in 2015 and forecasts that number will grow by 11%

to 1.1 trillion in 2016.

Instead of too little photography, we have too much!


Project Apollo Archive

NASA released in 2016 all of the photos of the Apollo Missions -- currently 14,225

photos.

Photos are organized by the film roll on which they were captioned

For those interested you can find them here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/projectapolloarchive/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/projectapolloarchive/


Do you recognize this photo?


Or this one?


Back to Our Definition

DIGITAL ASSETS = DATA (in files) + CONTEXT (in the form of metadata)

Key to the effective management of Digital Assets is the management of the metadata

This is the information that will quickly let find photo quickly and effectively for

proposals

It will also provide the necessary documentation needed for a progress photo to be

used in a claims action

You Digital Asset Management System



Components of Your Digital Asset Management System

A good Digital Asset Management System is made up of tools and processes*

– The repository

– The metadata index

– The search engine

– The access and rights sub-system

– The workflow or collaboration engine

* Intro to Digital Asset Management: Just what is a DAM? Megan Arthur, RealStory Group, April 2005


The Repository

The Three Fs

– Fast

– Flexible

– Fun (or at least doesn’t make users miserable)


The Metadata Index

The heart of the Digital Asset Management

System!

Provides the categories, keywords and

organization

If you can’t describe it, you will never be able to

find it

The place where you can benefit from an

integration with Vision CRM.


The Search Engine

If the Metadata Index is the heart, the Search Engine is

the brain

Needs to be flexible to allow users to broadly define

their search

Needs to be accurate so users have “first pass

success” on their searches

Another benefit of integration with Deltek CRM

This is area where shared file systems usually

breakdown

Case Study



Hill’s Challenge

Photography for 2,100 different projects

27 GBs of photography

Photography from all stages of the project

– Construction progress photos

– Renderings

– Final photos


Hill’s Challenge

Photography stored in a variety of places

– File shares

– SharePoint sites

Photos were tagged but there wasn’t always a good link back to the actual project.

Photo names and project names were often different


Decision to go with OpenAsset

Integration with Vision CRM

Ability to bulk load files

Strong search engine

Integrates with Active Directory for account management

Flexibility in photo output while storing only one version of the photo


Step 1: Organize Our Photography

OpenAsset’s integration with Vision CRM allowed us to use the metadata

we already had in the system to tag projects

Needed a file reference to link OpenAsset with Vision CRM

Created a shared file space organized by Vision CRM project number

Each project number was its own folder and all photography was placed in

the folder


Step 2: Upload Photography into OpenAsset

OpenAsset handled this part

OpenAsset uploaded the photography over the course of a morning

It really was that easy


Step 3: Link OpenAsset to Vision CRM

OpenAsset handled this part too as part of the upload

This was also a very painless process


What was the final product?

Demonstration



Where are we today?

2,804 projects in the system

68.5 GB of photography

89 users accessing the system

Averaging 8,000 new files a month


Where are we going?

Additional tagging of photos

Integration with Yammer

Training and broader access to employees

Please submit a survey for this session via the

mobile app.

32

Learn More

Get plugged in

• Join a user group (regional, virtual)

• Interact in Kona – Client Advisory Council

(CAC) and more! ([email protected])

• Join the MVP program

Visit the Vision kiosks in the Expo Hall

Follow the Vision Blog @ http://bit.ly/Vision_Blog

Attend a live VPM, CRM, Resource Planning,

demo or sign up for an upcoming webinar at

Deltek.com

mailto:[email protected]

http://bit.ly/Vision_Blog


Contact Information

Ed Biebel

[email protected]

215.309.7700

mailto:[email protected]

vi-91: developing a digital asset management system to ...€¦ · 8th largest u.s. construction...

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