OK, that's more like it. It's only 10:35 here in L.A. and I've already sat through two pretty good sessions.

Tony Byrne filled in for Henry Stewart regular Skiff Wager, who usually gives a spirited presentation and then moderates sessions with an energy that brings out a lot of audience interaction.

Tony handled his session quite well. I missed the first half but was there for the second half where he talked about "The Business Case for DAM." Tony used a model for building the business case for management, where the key factors are: [Click Read More, below, to continue]

• Greater Efficiency
• Reducing Risks
• Adding Value

He said you achieve greater efficiency largely through automation and findability (the latter a word he used repeatedly to denote the ease of finding assets). You can show reduced risks largely through things like rights management. And you can show the bean counters that you're adding value by leveraging and monetizing assets.

In the next phase, he went through what he called the "myths of ROI." He claimed you can't make a blanket statement that SaaS brings better ROI. Certainly, if short-term cost is a huge concern, SaaS can dramatically reduce your upfront costs. Over time, though, it's more likely that an SaaS solution would cost you more. So, again, if you must keep current outlays lean, you might benefit from going SaaS; but at some point it would be a good idea, once the money opens up, to invest in an in-house solution.

Another myth he tried to debunk was that if you project a decent ROI based on huge labor savings, well, don't count your chickens before they're hatched. An example he focused on was the projection that well-managed assets would naturally lead to less searching on the part of employees. He said that's often a faulty assumption, because people will be people and they will still tend to search. They may enter broader searches, or search more deeply, but in effect oftentimes a job expands to fill the time the employee has in the day. You know you've reached the labor-savings goal when you no longer need that person in that job.

And that's when I took out my imaginary gun and shot myself in my imaginary head.

I realized how many conferences I'd been to over many years where all these brains got together to drive home the need to put people out of work. A big pat on the back from the boss! Yeah, we cut 500 jobs with that one!

And here, right here at the conference, South Asian corporate giants like Tata Consultancy and HCL are just waiting to provide you with cost-reducing programs that save you tons of money by sending tons of jobs to low-paid workers in India. OK, end of rant. That's my thing. Maybe you all disagree. Shut my mouth and call me biscuit face!

Back to Tony himself, I just wanted to point out that I thought he did a great job of answering questions from the audience in a thoughtful and consultative way. I don't mind giving him a plug for a new four-hour, self-paced online course he's releasing soon called "Introduction to DAM Technology." 

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