I probably shouldn’t start the first blog entry in our Digital Asset Management (DAM) blog destroying anyone’s illusions about DAM, but I’ve entitled it “The DAM Truth” so … here goes… DAM is not a field of dreams when poorly implemented. If you just build it – they will not come. There is so much more. Like any good vegetable gardener knows, even once the seedling pokes its head out of the ground, you are still at risk. Unless you use the right balance of TLC, water, fertilizer, and proper weeding – you’ll just end up with an overgrown weed patch and no wonderful vegetables to eat.

Without proper planning for all of the other activities that cultivate and nurture a good DAM – all of the many users who drove you mad with their fire drill requests, bad habits, annoying naming conventions (e.g., logo1.tif) and chaos driven filing methods will still be there, behavior unchanged. It is your mission and your challenge to re-educate them and make them LOVE the DAM so much that they can’t think of any other way that they’d prefer to manage their valuable assets. This is the beginning of getting strategic value from your DAM investment.

It is still surprising that many DAM Project Managers, IT and Marketing teams as well as their executive sponsors, having fought the battle to get funding approved, chosen a DAM vendor and assuming that everything is done, wake up to a DAM nightmare when they open the doors to their new technology and no one shows up to the party. Everything in the DAM technology is implemented and working as planned. This has nothing to do with the functionality of the DAM. 

Over the years, I’ve spoken to many users of different DAM solutions around the world and heard numerous stories of disastrous failures in adoption levels, recidivism to either local or network drive storage of assets, or the worse abomination of all – users considering the DAM the next generation of their network “Z” drive to dump all their files willy-nilly without naming conventions or metadata.   But, I’ve also heard wonderful stories of great successes of companies and organizations that launched their DAM with great success and incredible user adoption. Departments regained days of time that had been spent servicing requests for assets. Products were put on shelves sooner because the marketing material was distributed on time and salespeople were happy having product images to distribute easily to their resellers and distribution channels.

What  we’ve advised those with DAM problems is that they have forgotten one of the most important aspects of putting new technology in place – the human factor, the culture change, the age-old cliché of teaching old dogs new tricks. I’m not just referring to putting everyone through training on using the product – it goes beyond this. It is more about establishing the brand for the DAM such that everyone’s first thought when looking for something should be clear. When you need to blow your nose – you look for a tissue.  It is somewhat ironic that in order to succeed, a system that is designed to serve a marketing function providing efficiency, agility, consistency and governance while speeding time to market, needs to be marketed to the end users that will ultimately benefit from it. Your DAM needs to be integrated into the fabric and culture of your company because unlike Ray Kinsella (AKA Kevin Costner) who had the faith and conviction that “they” would come to his field because he had built it for them, the same does not hold true when it comes to a new DAM. (For those of you unfamiliar with this wonderful 1989 film – see: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097351/ )

I suppose I might get some grief for stating this so bluntly. Often times, software companies don’t want you to think about all the other “stuff” that you need to do to be successful with their products – but my aim here is to give you the DAM truth….

So… what makes a DAM successful? Let’s review:  Implementing a successful DAM Solution involves much more than installation and configuration regardless of what DAM solution you put in place. In order to get strategic value from your company’s DAM investment, there are a variety of other organizational, departmental, cultural and technological processes and capabilities that need to be planned for and accomplished for a successful launch and ongoing victory.

These include:

• Increasing user adoption / culture change
• Marketing the DAM: Creating your own DAM Brand
• Innovative launch techniques for marketing the DAM solution internally and externally
• Launching domestically vs launching globally
• Phased approaches to solution rollouts
• Customizing / adding various interfaces to better meet organizations needs
• Gaining executive sponsorship/exposure
• Extending usage to external partners
• Integration with other enterprise systems

 Each of these topics deserves its own discussion time and I invite you as readers of this post to add your voices to the community as we try and cover many of these topics in upcoming posts.

Steam the torpedoes – full DAM ahead! 

Michael