In recent years, U.S. companies have created an onslaught of digital content that's challenging bandwidth and storage capacities as employees shoot documents and multimedia files back and forth at a dizzying pace. Meanwhile, those same employees spend hours searching for the content scattered throughout their companies.

Enter digital asset-management software, which essentially acts as a centralized digital library from which everything from training videos and product photos to presentations and white papers can be easily accessed and used.

Digital asset-management tools were initially aimed at media and entertainment companies looking for a way to get a handle on feature films, television shows, trailers, music files, and other so-called "rich" media, which, once digitized and stored, can be redistributed over the Internet. But while that business model has stalled amid squabbles over digital rights and slower-than-expected growth of consumer broadband Internet access, IT departments are being asked to deliver internal access to digital media.

The volume of digital assets is expanding too fast for many companies to manage. The result: These assets often are stored in remote locations throughout a company network, sometimes even on individual employees' desktops, making them inaccessible to the rest of the company. That means they're also frequently duplicated unnecessarily as employees re-create content that already exists but which they can't find.

Aside from lost productivity, the practice leads to inefficient storage and bandwidth-draining file transfers. Digital asset-management systems solve those problems by storing all digital files in a searchable, centralized repository accessible through a Web interface. Thus, if a marketing manager in Helsinki, Finland, needs to put together a product data sheet for customers in his region, he can see if anyone else in the company, anywhere else in the world, has already made such a document before creating his own.

According to a variety of vendors and research firms, as much of 80% of the information that now resides within most companies is unstructured content, such as Word documents, HTML pages, video files, and photos. "That's what's getting the attention of CIOs," says Giga Information Group analyst Bob Markham, noting that this figure represents a major shift over the last few years. "They're realizing they need to treat content the same way they treat data."

The growing use of collaborative technologies is also driving the issue, because such practices place a premium on putting relevant materials at employees' fingertips. "Any content that's not available can hinder a project," Markham says.

The bottom line: Companies need Web-based applications that let employees search for a variety of content types that can be reused regardless of format. The ad hoc systems that have developed in many companies simply won't hack it for much longer.

And that's not all, Markham says. Companies are using digital asset management in other ways, such as to open up new uses of content or to make employees' jobs easier by logically grouping related information. He points to the real-estate industry, which is using digital asset management to tie together the various elements of property listings, from photos and title documents to contracts and contingency agreements.

The value of linking related assets can't be underestimated, says Sebastian Holst, VP of marketing for digital asset-management vendor Artesia Technologies Inc., since often one piece of content is only worthwhile if it's attached to another. "If you take a $10 bill and rip it in half, you don't have two fives," he says. "You have paper."