Data management

The drone footage from last year’s roof survey sits on an external drive. The marketing images are in Dropbox, the product photography on a server, and the newest videos on three employees’ phones. The product description exists in three versions, and nobody knows which one is current. When a new webshop, catalogue or campaign has to go live, the time goes into looking for the material instead of using it. That is the problem data management solves.

In practice it means gathering the company’s digital material in one place, giving it names and structure, and making it easy to find again — for everyone, not just for the one person who knows where things are. The disciplines are called DAM (Digital Asset Management) for images, video and documents, and PIM (Product Information Management) for product data such as descriptions, specifications and prices.

Drone data is the part we focus on in particular. A single drone job quickly produces hundreds of images, an orthophoto, a 3D model and a point cloud — files that are heavy, hard to name sensibly and often only readable by the person who flew the job. Without structure they end up on a drive and are never used again. With structure they become documentation you can compare year by year: how did the roof look last time, what has moved, what was repaired.

That focus comes from a working life spent on exactly this discipline. 23Solutions’ founder, Jimmy Madsen, has 25 years of experience from Digizuite DAM — a Danish Digital Asset Management platform — and stayed on for close to two years at Keyshot after the acquisition. The experience of keeping large volumes of media files in order for other companies is the direct reason we treat drone data as digital assets that must remain findable, shareable and reusable — not as files that are simply handed over once.

The advice always starts with what you already have: what exists, where it sits, and who needs it. From there we build a structure that holds — naming, metadata and a place where things belong — and connect it to the systems you already use, so the material gets put to work instead of sitting still. The goal is not one more system, but control over your data and value from it again and again.