Offshore worker at Goliat. Photo: Marthe Nyvoll / © Vår Energi
Vår Energi: Ensuring control and effective communication with DAM
Vår Energi is a Norwegian oil & gas company, founded on more than 50 years of operational experience. With more than 1,300 employees and equity stakes in 47 producing fields, they must ensure effective routines for communications and media handling.
In this article, we’ll cover how Vår Energi ensures efficiency, control, and sustainability by establishing a single source of truth across digital channels and platforms.
The power of metadata
With thousands of media files stored in one place and new ones coming in regularly, metadata is key to ensuring effective content operations. For Vår Energi, this means that every media file is easily searchable, with necessary information easily available to the right people.
Read more: Metadata management - what it is and why it matters
Through effective metadata management, Vår Energi can easily ensure that external designers and agencies get access to the right files - and only the right files - because the access rights are automatically tied to the assets' metadata. Once a file is available to a certain individual, the person can easily see information related to the file, for example, which facility is photographed or who owns the rights to the image.
This is both a time-saver and a sustainability measure since it allows for all media files and information to be easily searchable in one central platform, avoiding duplicates and unnecessary storage costs.
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— “Having a system like Fotoware is important for sustainability because if you don’t have such a system, people will just store their files on local and private drives, and then you will end up with many duplicates, which take up a lot of data storage. So, having everything in one place, with a single source of truth, I think is a matter of sustainability as well.”
Managing images of private individuals
It’s not unusual for Vår Energi to share pictures of private individuals in their communications. These can be key staff members or other employees featured in work-related events or activities. In such instances, it’s crucial for GDPR-compliance to have control of who is present in the pictures and what types of usage this person has consented to.
With the Fotoware Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution, Vår Energi can easily tag images with the right people and attach consent forms when relevant, to ensure a smoother process of GDPR compliance for their photos.
Keeping control of the brand
In the case of Vår Energi, one of the main motivations for investing in a DAM solution was to achieve control of the brand and its portrayal to the public. For this purpose, media files are essential, as they’re the visual representation of the company. With a proper DAM in place, Vår Energi can easily ensure that the right visuals are available to the right people at all times.
Read more: 5 common challenges easily solved with Digital Asset Management
In addition to making media files available to internal employees and hired agencies, the Fotoware DAM is also utilized to share collections with the public. Thanks to role-based access control, selected portions of the system are made publicly available, allowing anyone needing a specific image or logo to access and download it. Certain metadata fields, like the copyright and ownership of specific images, are also made clearly visible.
Digital Asset Management for energy companies
In the case of Vår Energi, the DAM system is mainly used by the communications department to ensure full control, sustainability, and more effective GDPR compliance for media files. While these are common use cases amongst Energy companies, they’re not the only ones.
One of the most notable perks of DAM solutions is their flexibility. They can be tailored in great detail based on the organization’s needs. For instance, one can create custom metadata fields relevant to the business and integrate with other third parties to streamline digital operations. Explained in short, for tasks related to visual files and metadata, a DAM can help in all processes related to the organization, collaboration, and distribution of data and assets.
