How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Why is Digital Asset Management so complex?
What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Transcript:
Henrik de Gyor: 00:00 This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Ian Matzen. Ian, how are you?
Ian Matzen: 00:08 I’m well, thank you very much, Henrik.
Henrik de Gyor: 00:09 Ian, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Ian Matzen: 00:14 I’ve been involved with Digital Asset Management for about six years professionally. Four of those years, I’ve been a remote Digital Asset Manager. I’m currently working as the Digital Asset Management Librarian with Wells Fargo. They have a Marketing Department and they have a Digital Asset Management system there. I’ve been helping with the system’s rollout and testing new features, training new groups, and setting up the system for those new groups. I’ve also been working on asset migration, workflow automation and spending a bit of time on user adoption. In my work there, I have been serving as a consultant. We had a DAM reporting project that involves data analysis and display… or working with that… Visualizing that data for us to understand that better. I’ve also been working on some projects involving record retention and various user adoption projects including a DAM gamification project that I’m currently rolling out.
Ian Matzen: 01:24 Before that, I was the Digital Asset Manager at America’s Test Kitchen, which is a Boston-based publisher where I managed not only the Digital Asset Management system, but also their content management system and our workflow management system. I did a fair amount of metadata modeling for both the DAM and the CMS, Digital Asset Management system and the Content Management System. And one of the high points there is I built, designed and deployed an enterprise taxonomy and did a fair amount of automation, including asset ingest automation and digital rights management tagging automatically to digital assets for digital rights management tagging. I also did a bit of work on capturing raw data around system usage and analyzing that data to measure specifically the way that our users were reusing digital assets to show the value of the system.
Ian Matzen: 02:24 Even before that my work was as a Digital Asset Technician for a Net-a-Porter. They are a London-based luxury brand online retailer. They have offices around the world. And there, I developed a controlled vocabularies for various groups. I configured the user interface and did a quality assurance during various upgrades.
Ian Matzen: 02:45 But my work with digital assets really predates the six years I’ve been doing Digital Asset Management professionally. I’ve been working with digital assets ever since I took my first film editing class in university. I was part of the first class to really move away from the Moviola flatbed and into nonlinear editing. So, I’m really passionate about rich media, about audiovisual media workflows and technology especially as it relates to part of the creative process. For me, nothing’s really more exciting than helping art directors, designers, editors, and motion graphic artists and other artists create their work.
Ian Matzen: 03:24 That was the case when I first started working at an advertising agency and remains so in my work at I’m Marketing Department at Wells Fargo.
Henrik de Gyor: 03:34 Ian, Why is Digital Asset Management so complex?
Ian Matzen: 03:39 There are several different aspects that are complicated or complex about Digital Asset Management. I think the first that I can think of is the ever-expanding definition of what we mean by digital assets. And in most circles, when we think of or talk about digital assets, we think of audiovisual media including images, videos, animations and audio. However, more recently in some of the jobs that I’ve been in, we’ve added a lot, many more different types of files and formats for that list, including emails, text, HTML, even data are being managed by DAM Managers. So the question is, you know, should every type of visual file be supported by the DAM system?
Ian Matzen: 04:22 Ideally, they should be, but not all of the DAM systems out there are created equal. And really, you mean what it comes down to is, is choosing the best option for the digital content you’re managing. For example, the Digital Asset Management system I worked with at America’s Test Kitchen worked very well with images, whereas the current system that I worked with at Wells Fargo worked very well with video. So when it comes down to, you know, finding the right system for the material that you’re managing.
Ian Matzen: 04:53 Another aspect that adds to the complexity of Digital Asset Management is managing expectations. And that goes for users as well as the stakeholders and folks who you might report to. I think many users expect the Digital Asset Management system to behave in the same way that a search engine does. They might be similar, but the two are inherently different when it comes to search.
Ian Matzen: 05:19 Content is index differently. For starters, search engines rely on inbound links and sitemap indexing. Whereas Enterprise search requires applying terms from a controlled vocabulary and the context, of course, is very different. Also, companies want to capitalize on their investment in a DAM system. And so they turned customizing the system to meet their business requirements rather than opting for another best of breed product. So in this way, companies unknowingly risk customizing themselves into a corner, making system upgrades and migration, very challenging if not prohibitively expensive. So before or enhancing the system, it’s a good idea to ask whether another reasonable, reasonably priced system might be a better option and seek out other customers of that system who have done some enhancements to the same system that you’re using. There are risks for either option, whether you want to customize or build out your current DAM solution or go with another system.
Ian Matzen: 06:19 So a good project manager can help mitigate those risks. Finally, I think the other aspect that lends itself to the complexity is the accelerating pace of technology. Whether you know how to build an extension in Java, design a workflow automation using logic or having a solid understanding of what these are, I think it’s a good idea to at least be aware of them and have some idea of how to develop a software, how workflows can be put together and at least designed, because I think there are a lot of aspects to Digital Asset Management and the more you know, I think that the more valuable, the more helpful you’ll be in your work.
Henrik de Gyor: 07:00 Ian, What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Ian Matzen: 07:07 I think one of the main challenges to Digital Asset Management is search. Search is dependent on metadata. Much of the metadata needs to be manually entered. Though some of it can be automatically appended to digital files or to the records within a DAM system. Really it comes down to users devoting the time to adding that descriptive information. it is challenging to get them to do that and even more so getting them to do it consistently and over time. That time never really ends because metadata must change to reflect new contexts and new users that are being onboarded. So I think that that is a challenge to managing digital assets. I think the other aspect that is challenging with Digital Asset Management is showing trust. And I think what I’ve seen with many of the systems that I’ve managed is that slow interfaces or slow experience, buggy systems. If there was poor UI or lack of transparency, they all had people’s view of that DAM system.
Ian Matzen: 08:17 Their trust in that DAM system will be impacted by those aspects. So it’s much harder to win back that trust if people are experiencing one of those issues. So it’s important to, I do a lot of testing to ensure that the system is working. Quality assurance is a huge part of my job. And also to a certain extent doing a fair amount of examining the user interface and doing a UAT to ensure that the interface itself is making sense to them. And, of course, having some sort of way of tracking the digital assets through their life will end, have they been downloaded when they’ve been used in a layout perhaps if there are images. All that adds to the trust that the users have in the system.
Ian Matzen: 09:05 Some of the successes that I’ve seen in Digital Asset Management have been that for one, Digital Asset Management is a bonafide profession. I think because we have conferences now there are many job postings that ask for Digital Asset Management professionals. I think that that is a win. I think it’s very important to acknowledge and acknowledge the work that you’ve done and that other writers and other folks who are in our industry, I think it’s that’s good. Also, I think another success is centralization, and I’m not just talking about having all of our assets in one system, but also consolidating the number of systems that are found at that various companies. I think, in a rather than having, you know, four or five different, systems, some of which might be system of records, some may not be. I think it’s important to acknowledge that being able to consolidate them, that the material, but also reduce the number of systems that are being used and paid for by companies is a success.
Ian Matzen: 10:11 Another aspect or another success of Digital Asset Management is realizing workflow efficiencies. I think there’s an opportunity to renegotiate and redesign workflows. And I think that many of us working in this arena in Digital Asset Management would say that that’s something they spend a good deal of their time doing. Some examples are auto ingesting digital assets into the system. At America’s Test Kitchen, I set up a fully automated ingest. We went from doing a lot of the cataloging manually and would, you know, the folks who were consuming those digital assets had to wait for that material to be ingested before they could see and use that. Having that automated allowed people to access us those much quicker. The other aspect I think of automation is validating metadata at, again, America’s test kitchen, we found a way to actually go through and ensure that the metadata was there, that it existed.
Ian Matzen: 11:13 Folks took the time to put it in, but also validating the name against a convention we had set up. And then finally there’s a way that you can do a fair amount of work auto-tagging material. The taxonomy, that I set up for America’s Test Kitchen. One of the aspects that I, or at least challenges that I faced was applying that taxonomy to our existing or legacy content. We had over 800,000 records. Having an enterprise taxonomy is a great accomplishment, but if you can’t go back and, and actually tag that material, it’s not going to have as much impact or value. So I did develop a means of auto-tagging or existing content through automation.
Ian Matzen: 11:59 So, the last success I wanted to mention was the increased value of digital assets. I think by having a digital asset sitting on your desktop, it may be the most wonderful, incredibly creative item, but if no one can see them… To see that asset, it’s not going to have as much value as it would if it was in a Digital Asset Management system where it can be found and reused. So I think access is a huge part of that equation. But I think ultimately our goal is to make digital assets findable and see that their value increase.
Henrik de Gyor: 12:35 Ian, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Ian Matzen: 12:41 I would suggest that they would navigate to my blog. I have a blog called tameyourassets.com and I do a fair amount of blogging and writing and my intent is to share my knowledge and experience with others, especially best practices. So I hope that listeners would consider going to that URL. I think another aspect or another suggestion that I have is just know your DAM systems. It’s important to know what current systems there are both within the organization that might be a part of, but also, systems that are being offered by other vendors. It’s important to see what current and upcoming features they’re offering so that you could ask for those features for the current system that you’re using. I think another aspect of that is as partner with other system adopters or other people managing the DAM system, the same DAM system that you’re using to drive that vendor road map. So I think partnering and forming that network of system users and managers is very important. And then, also another aspect is education. I think it is very important to learn and master DAM best practices, to ask questions, learn from other practitioners, take online courses or even take courses at a local community college.
Ian Matzen: 14:05 I think finding courses in library science or computer science or data analysis, will all help you at least to give you that understanding of what those aspects are that, you can talk with other folks in your organization to help manage digital assets. And then finally, I just wanted to mention, finding a mentor in the Digital Asset Management space. They don’t have to be necessarily someone with much more or any additional experience that you might have. It could be a peer, but the benefits of having a mentor would be to find some encouragement and support for your journey in the Digital Asset Management space. They can offer you honest advice and feedback, what you’re doing and how you’re managing digital assets, and then, of course, having a mentor is helpful to expand your professional network.
Henrik de Gyor: 14:57 Great. Well, thanks Ian.
Ian Matzen: 14:59 You’re welcome. Thank you very much.
Listen to Paul Garrisontalk about Digital Asset Management
Transcript:
Henrik de Gyor: This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Paul Garrison. Paul, how are you?
Paul Garrison: I’m good, thank you. How are you?
Henrik de Gyor: Good. Paul, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Paul Garrison: I’m currently a Digital Asset Management Supervisor for McCann World Group here in Detroit. Previously, I worked as an Account Manager for the Getty Images DAM product called Media Manager and I had several accounts throughout the Midwest. And then on a personal note, I’m also working towards my Master’s in Information and Library Science at Wayne State here in Detroit with an emphasis on digital content management. So my involvement goes a little bit deeper than my 9 to 5 job.
Henrik de Gyor: Paul, how does a marketing and advertising company use Digital Asset Management?
Paul Garrison: Well, we’re an agency and obviously in advertising, an agency creates campaigns and those campaigns create assets. We have an internal DAM system here for our in-process creative assets and this DAM holds our photoshoots and purchased stock images, things like that for our creative department to access and use.
Henrik de Gyor: Paul, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Paul Garrison: Yeah, there are several challenges I’d like to talk about. The biggest of which that I’ve seen is migrating an existing system to a new platform. I’ve been involved in this a few times and the big underlying question is who is making the choice of which system to purchase and how are they deciding that. There are so many systems available now and how do you discover which is best for your installation? That’s frustrating to go down this path and then later discover that the specific features you highlighted or needed in your RFP are weak or not offered at all. So do you backtrack at that point or are you financially committed and have to go with what you have?
Paul Garrison: Another challenge is having serious competent people working on the system. Quality metadata is so mandatory and the saying ‘garbage in, garbage out’ is so true in DAM. Metadata differentiates the assets. So if you just tag 100 assets with all the same information, how can you find the one asset that you need? So often just the minimum information is provided and this does a disservice to users of the community. Another challenge is system adoption by end-users. Often, development is focused on what the developers can do or think is best and this does not always coordinate with what the end-user community understands or can navigate. It really benefits the whole system to engage the end-user before or during development to make sure that what you are building is compatible to their thinking. And so surveys, interviews, and focus groups will to better understand the user’s mindset and to build towards that as much as possible. The user also has to understand that the DAM is not Google. So there is training that is necessary to properly and successfully use the system without frustration.
Paul Garrison: And the last challenge that I’d like to mention is governance. There needs to be someone monitoring this site, especially an enterprise site to make sure that the information is clean in quality. Someone to uphold best practices and train when necessary to make sure the sites succeeds. That person must have the backing of a corporate champion as governance flows from the top down and without backing it is very difficult to enforce the necessary rules for the site.
Paul Garrison: Successes… I would like to say that I’m very interested in reporting and analysis and we monitor our KPIs to see if any trends are happening month to month on the site, either good or bad and we’ve noticed a surge in certain product images and since then we’ve gone farther to increase their availability, especially in domestic and global dealer markets to maximize their usage. That particular classification of images now our second most popular on a site that has over a half a million downloads a year, so paying attention to what works or doesn’t has been very helpful and for those looking to develop a DAM, involve with an professional from the start. This is not work for an administrative assistant to do in their free time. Someone knowledgeable about library science, assets and taxonomy who can work with the departments of the organization to understand their pain points and gather their feedback to build into the system. You need someone to spearhead the project and work with IT to make sure all the technological aspects are covered. Picking a system is difficult and working your way through all the RFPs, demos and sales pitches. It takes understanding and knowledge. You have to do your homework to begin on having successful footing.
Henrik de Gyor: Paul, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Paul Garrison: Sure. As a wrapped up in the daily work as we all get, it’s always key to consider the end-user of the system. Is Your taxonomy consistent with their jargon? Can they find the great assets that you just uploaded for their sales push? Do they understand the layout of the interface and how to use the facets to search and filter? Talk to them when you can and listen to their comments, successes and failures. I like to make job aids [brief task-specific PDFs] for issues that come to my attention. If one person is having difficulty, I’m sure there are many other silent ones who are as well. I tried to distribute them [PDF job aids] when possible or at least have them easily available to send out with an email. This gives the issue a visual and walks the user through it step by step for potential DAM professionals.
Paul Garrison: I personally have a lot of patience. Patience for users who contact me and for the system that typically will hiccup just when you don’t want it to. I have attention to detail, obsessively so, and that makes me want to do it right the first time and not to cut corners. I’ve learned a lot going back to library school, even with 15 years of DAM experience, many existing resources have been brought to my attention. Things like the Library of Congresssubject lists, the MARC standards and these resources that standardize values across many mediums. If you plan to eventually work and integrate with other systems, these resources are important to know and to utilize. And lastly, I know myself and what makes me tick and I enjoy this work. It will bore some people and drive other people crazy, but I enjoy this work and seeing the results by analyzing reports from the system and I track it year over year for performance.
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Sandra Sundback discusses Digital Asset Management
Transcript:
Henrik de Gyor: This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, I’m speaking with Sondra Sunday back. Sandra, how are you?
Sandra Sundback: Hi, I’m good. How are you?
Henrik de Gyor: Great. Sandra, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Sandra Sundback: Okay, so I work as the product owner of our DAM, which basically means that I’m the subject matter expert and I’m responsible for the implementation of our enterprise-wide DAM and actually for the whole product and the concept. I work really closely with all of our stakeholders. It’s basically the vendor, our end users, which we have quite a lot of and then the IT department and all the developers from our integration partner. Also, I wrote my Master’s thesis on DAM which was a case study on Kesko and its current status on asset management. And then I did an analysis on how the implementation of a DAM could help us achieve our strategic objectives. So I actually also studied the field for quite some time during that time.
Henrik de Gyor: How does a leading Finnish listed trading sector company use Digital Asset Management?
Sandra Sundback: Well, we actually just started our implementation project in mid-April, so we haven’t really been able to start using the system quite yet, but the aim is to build kind of a central hub which would work for all of our content creators and it would enable them to have a much faster time to market for much more streamlined production processes. And this we aim to achieve too, streamlining the production processes with the tools that DAM provides us and also by using all possible automation possibilities. And just to kind of downsize the manual work for everyone by combining these tools. And our DAM utilizes a lot of existing enterprise data as its metadata. So for instance, we collect a product data and recipe data from our other systems APIs and we plan to highly concentrate on making the metadata as business-centric as we possibly can so that it will both serve the end users of the DAM. And then also our publishing and marketing automation processes. And we just completed the first migration project last week and actually, and we’d have now kicked off a kind of a soft launch, so we’re refining the metadata with our DAM champions and they will do a lot of manual refining and fine-tuning of the metadata, but we will also run several refinement runs from the data sources from the APIs which we have available, but we still have four upcoming migration is to go through. So the work is far from done just yet.
Henrik de Gyor: Sandra, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Sandra Sundback: Well, in our case we went through a very rigorous discovery and decision-making process, which at times felt really hard and frustrating almost. We also actually had some difficulties in finding the right vendor for us. So a vendor who would be able to provide us with the suitable toolkit for us and how we wanted to implement our DAM. So we actually ended up having two RFP rounds, but fortunately, we were able to use some expert help outside of K group on the other time around or the second time around. Also, we decided to do a proof of concept with the two finalists vendors and finally we found our match. If I were to think about our biggest success, it’s probably how we prepared for the first migration and the cleanup of that legacy system was pretty well prepared and all the stakeholders were very engaged in getting the cleanup done.
So we ended up cleaning up the system, I guess within a month roughly. We migrated 200,000 assets and we were also able to classify different priorities for the assets which we were migrating. So it made me very happy actually to see kind of everyone dig in and start working on that. We also did have a pretty extensive mapping of the metadata from the first migration or the legacy system. And that’s going to help us a lot when we tried to manage kind of the metadata refining phase now in the new DAM after the migration is done. But the beginning was really tough. But after we got the vendor and we started implementing, things have actually been moving really fast and I’m really, really happy to see that.
Henrik de Gyor: And what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Sandra Sundback: I created a top three. Probably I would have more, but my first one is never, never, ever, never give up.
There’s going to be times when people don’t really understand what DAM is all about and they’re going to question the whole endeavor and probably everyone won’t even see the benefit in investing huge amounts of money for a resource to do the DAM implementation right, but I would say that by analyzing the current state, calculating what benefits you could gain and continuously communicating with the decision makers that’s a key issue and it’s going to help. And we actually went through almost two years of internal marketing and justifying the need and mapping of the vendors and trying to find the perfect vendor and before we could start implementing. So, I really at times felt that I wanted to give up, but I’m really happy I didn’t. So that would be my first advice, never give up. It’s, it’s gonna happen.
The second one is that do your due diligence, which basically what I mean by that is that you really need to know who the users will be in the organization. So also again, a mapping and discovery phase is very important and also understanding the different processes which they’re currently using and who their partners are, for instance, in content production or where they’re buying their assets from and creating them. It actually helped me a lot that I have a marketing background. I understood the processes and the pain points pretty well actually from when we interviewed the stakeholders. And also, of course, it’s important to know what the current systems are which the organization is using, where assets might leave at the moment and how many assets and how to migrate. Then how to build metadata model and the taxonomy in the DAM, which will then serve all the users in the new DAM. So that those are actually the hardest pre-work that needs to be done. But it pays off in when, when you start implementing.
And then as my third one, I actually chose to use all the DAM resources and the whole network which is available out there. The best thing that I invested in was buying a couple, a super great books actually on how to do the DAM implementation right and where the focus should be. It really helped me in a kind of forming my vision and also I reached out to the communities on LinkedIn for instance, and I, I have done my best to network with peers in seminars. And the funny thing about the DAM community is actually that people are really helpful and they are ready to discuss difficulties or give their best practices and ideas with you. So it’s really worth a try at least to connect with people.
Another DAM Podcast 