Identity in a Digital World

A company's logo can be an extremely valuable asset if managed properly. Each and every impression leads to increased awareness and adds value to the brand. In today's world, corporate communications move at lightning speed. This speed can work for a company or against it. With the proper controls, positive impressions multiply quicker than ever. At the same time, poor judgment or execution of a logo can spread just as quickly.

With added emphasis on identity, the role of the corporate identity manager has gained new respect. Unfortunately several factors affect this role:

Most corporations have decentralized management making education and assistance with corporate identity programs more difficult.
Desktop publishing has empowered more staff than ever with the ability to create communications materials. The corporate identity manager has more people than ever to manage.
New forms of media have created the need for more complex standards.
Digital files can create confusion and an improper application of a logo can be reproduced and distributed easily.
A new sense of creative freedom encourages individuals to make decisions on a local basis without any thought to the bigger picture.

In the past, an identity could be managed with very traditional forms of communication. Once standards were established, an identity manual could be distributed to key staff and vendors who were trained in the business of corporate communications. These manuals are expensive to produce and difficult to keep current. They were also difficult to distribute across the new decentralized organizations.

Brady Communications experienced these problems first hand. As corporate identity designers, we realized that the industry standards were due to change. A dramatic shift in the tools to manage corporate identities was needed.

Like many identity managers, we first moved to digital files delivered via diskettes or CD-ROMs. This served a valuable purpose and temporarily met our clients' needs. But as the market continued to change, more was needed.

We believe that the future of identity management now lies in sophisticated web-based tools that educate, inform, and assist corporate staff and vendors. To accomplish our goal, we created an ASP product that corporations can use to build large scale, complex Web tools to replace the traditional print tools.

With these applications, a variety of tools and features can be incorporated into a company's Web site based guide in a timely and cost-effective manner.

Password protection can allow the corporate identity manager to maintain control of distribution as well as provide user logs.
Those requiring identity materials anywhere in the world can obtain them immediately.
Tutorials can be used to educate specific audiences.
Files can be downloaded thus avoiding expensive recreation of files or duplication of effort.
Content can be managed and posted by identity managers without the services of Web programmers or knowledge of programming languages.
Changes and/or updates can be implemented on a global basis in a matter of minutes.
Identity information is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

The ASP technology used to create this product is unique and also includes a powerful set of administration tools that allows the corporate identity manager to accomplish their goals with a limited staff.

With the advent of these new tools, corporate identity managers can now retake control of the company's identity and deliver a quality product within real world budgets.

To learn more about this new technology and how you can move to a digital identity contact newbusiness@mindchisel.com. MindChisel is an affiliate of Brady Communications.