adobe experience manager

Modernization, Digital Transformation, and Other Multisyllabic Words: Why?

Back when I was with IDEMIA and working with U.S. states to implement (physical) driver’s license production systems, a big word floating around states and their CIOs was “modernization.”

Because many state and federal systems are really really ancient.

But it’s not just governments that have fallen off the path. Many business and government entities, possibly including your own, are in desperate need of modernization, or at least of digital transformation.

Four reasons for digital transformation

Why do you need digital transformation? Here are four reasons why you should transform:

Are you suffering from outmoded manual processes? Do your business processes require a lot of outmoded manual steps? Are there steps that you can automate?
Are you unable to change your business as the market changes? Is your website and other systems locked into a 2015 or 2005 process? If the market changed tomorrow, how long would it take you to change with it? Could you business benefit from a flexible modular implementation that allows rapid change?
Are you blind to your business operations? Can you gather metrics that help you know how your business is doing? For marketers, these could be key process indicators (KPIs) that alert you as prospects move from awareness to consideration to conversion. For operations personnel, these could be performance metrics. But you’re flying blind if you can’t get those metrics, or if you’re getting the wrong metrics.
Are your customers unhappy? This is probably the biggest reason of all. Do your current systems frustrate your customers? For businesses (i.e. firms where customers do not have to content with a government monopoly), are your customers about to flee elsewhere?

Yes, you have to perform a cost-benefit analysis, but in many cases you’ll realize future revenue by transforming your digital system and removing inefficiencies.

Two digital transformation experts

There are a number of consulting firms that can help you digitally transform your systems. Bredemarket is NOT one of them (although I can help you transform your marketing).

But it doesn’t matter with me now, because this post is going to highlight two other firms that can help you perform digital transformation: one very specific, and one that is general.

Adobe Experience Cloud Digital Transformation: KBWEB Consult

If you have a mid-sized business and need to digitally transform your Adobe Experience Manager implementation, or other parts of your Adobe Experience Cloud solution, KBWEB Consult is the firm to help you. KBWEB Consult and its people have transformed digital solutions for Kaiser Permanente, LinkedIn, Shimano, and other firms.

Book a meeting with KBWEB Consult directly at CEO Krassimir Boyanov’s Calendly calendar page.

General Digital Transformation: Silicon Tech Solutions

If you have wider digital transformation needs, talk to Silicon Tech Solutions. Offering custom software development and other services in addition to digital transformation, Silicon Tech Solutions addresses multiple needs for small and mid-size businesses. With a team that has gained experience from employment at Amazon and Facebook and from multiple consulting projects, Silicon Tech Solutions is ready to help your firm.

Get more information from Silicon Tech Solutions by contacting them via Bredemarket at my Silicon Tech Solutions page and clicking on the Silicon Tech Solutions logo.

The Return on Investment (ROI) of Digital Asset Management (DAM)

(Imagen 4)

I recently downloaded an ebook from Canto entitled “The ROI of DAM: How to Prove the Business Value of Digital Asset Management.” If you would like to download it also, visit this page.

Why do you need to manage digital assets? Because if your company has thousands or millions of digital assets, individual ones will be so hard to find that you’ll start adding an “N” to the “DAM” acronym.

Canto argues that its digital asset management solution delivers positive ROI by the following:

Saving time and reducing waste
Accelerating speed to market and improving content quality
Reducing asset production costs
Boosting revenue with brand consistency
Minimizing business risk

The ebook quotes some numbers: $20,000 savings here, more savings there.

Of course, Canto isn’t the only DAM in town, as my former coworker Krassimir Boyanov will not hesitate to tell you. Krassimir heads KBWEB Consult, a boutique technology firm that provides consulting services for Adobe Experience Manager users.

A wombat holding a phone displaying a digital identity, surrounded by papers with pictures of cars. Two Dolby speakers are in the back of the room. — (She’s tidied up and) I can’t find anything.

I’ve previously quoted his thoughts on a consistent taxonomy for digital assets, but Boyanov has also addressed ROI issues in KBWEB Consult’s own blog: specifically, looking at Adobe Experience Manager Assets, the DAM component of Adobe Experience Manager. Here’s part of what he said:

In July 2024, IDC examined the business value of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Assets. Based on interviews with AEM Assets customers, IDC concluded that the interviewed customers could realize an average annual cost saving of $9.04 million per organization. These cost savings came from multiple sources:

Reduced risk of using out-of-date/unapproved assets (52%)

Reduced risk of accidental disclosure of assets (27%)

Reduced spending of duplicative (62%) or unused (40%) assets

Reduced agency spending by completing work in-house (24%)

Reduced go-to-market time (55%)

Reduced time for content to go from creation to production (47%)

Reduced time for content in a new form factor (39%)

Reduced time to create a new digital asset (66%)

Reduced time to repurpose an existing digital asset (73%)

Reduced time to create a rendition of an asset (60%)

Those are some DAM good numbers. And KBWEB Consult (and IDC) didn’t gate them.

Tech marketers, do you have similar return on investment numbers you would like to share with your end customers? Bredemarket can help you share those numbers. Talk to me before your competitors return YOUR investment to THEM.

Stop losing prospects! Use Bredemarket content for tech marketers

Tech marketers, are you afraid?

(She’s Tidied Up and) I Can’t Find Anything

Are you having trouble finding an asset such as a digital identity or a commercial asset? If you are, there are ways to make things easier to find.

An example from the identity world

Identity Jedi David Lee recently shared his thoughts on “The Hidden Cost of Bad Identity Data (and How to Fix It).” Lee didn’t focus on the biometric data, but instead on the textual data that is associated with a digital identity.

“Let’s say you’re kicking off a new identity program. You know you need user location to drive access policies, governance rules, or onboarding flows. But your authoritative source has location data in five different formats—some say “NY,” others say “New York,” and some list office addresses with zip codes and floor numbers.

“You tell yourself: “We’ll clean it up later.”

“What you’ve really done is commit your future self to a much more expensive project.”

Garbage in, garbage out.

An example from the commerce world

Krassimir Boyanov of KBWEB Consult provides another example of a problem in his post “Why AEM Assets Smart Tagging Makes Your Marketing Work Easier.” Let’s say that you’re managing the images (the “assets”) that display on a company’s online website. You have thousands if not millions of images to manage. How do you find a particular image?

One way to do this is to “tag” each image with descriptive information.

But if you do it wrong, there will be problems.

“Tagging is inconsistent. If 10 people are tagging the items, the tags will probably be inconsistent. While one person tags an item as a “car,” another may tag a similar item as an “automobile.” Although the two assets are similar, this is hidden because of inconsistent tag use.”

Again, garbage in, garbage out.

An organizational solution from the identity world

Lee and Boyanov approach these similar problems from two perspectives.

Lee, as an Identity and Access Management (IAM) expert, approaches this as a business problem and offers the following recommendations (among others):

“Clean early, not late: Push for authoritative sources to normalize and codify the data before it hits the IAM system….

“Push accountability upstream: Don’t accept ownership of fixing problems you don’t control. Instead, elevate the data issue to the right stakeholder (hint: HR, IT, or Legal).”

While Lee can certainly speak to the technologies that can normalize and codify the data, he prefers in this post to concentrate on the organizational issues that cause dirty data, and on how to prevent these issues from reoccurring in the future.

A technological solution from the commerce world

Boyanov can also speak to business and organizational issues as an Adobe Experience Manager consultant who has helped multiple organizations implement the Adobe product. But in this case he concentrates on a technological approach offered by Adobe:

A Taxonomy is a system of organizing tags based on shared characteristics, which are usually hierarchical structured per organizational need. The structure can help finding a tag faster or impose a generalization.
Example: There is a need to subcategorize stock imagery of cars. The taxonomy could look like:

/subject/car/
/subject/car/sportscar
/subject/car/sportscar/porsche
/subject/car/sportscar/ferrari
…
/subject/car/minivan
/subject/car/minivan/mercedes
/subject/car/minivan/volkswagen
…
/subject/car/limousine
…

Once the taxonomy is defined, assets can be tagged (preferably automatically) in accordance with the hierarchy.

Presumably David Lee’s identity world can similarly come up with a method to standardize addresses BEFORE they are added to an IAM system.

As deep as any ocean

Whether you’re dealing with a digital identity or a commercial asset, you need to ensure that you can find this asset in the future. This requires planning beforehand.

And a content creation project also requires planning beforehand, such as asking questions before beginning the project.

If you are an identity/biometric or technology firm that requires content creation, or perhaps proposal or analysis services, Bredemarket can help. After all, content creation is science…and art.

Talk to me: https://bredemarket.com/cpa/

CPA