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Category Archives: User Adoption

User Adoption


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Another DAM Podcast interview with Madeline Velez on Digital Asset Management

Listen to Madeline Velez talk about Digital Asset Management

Transcript:

Henrik:  This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Madeline Velez. Madeline, how are you?

Madeline:  I am good thank you. How are you?

Henrik:  Great. Madeline, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Madeline:  My career in Digital Asset Management started over 15 years ago with the Yankee Candle Company organizing their digital merchandise assets. I then worked for Bristol-Myers Squibb with digital pharmaceutical assets and now I’m the digital assets specialist for the marketing and communications department at Shriners Hospitals for Children Headquarters in Tampa. In my new position, I played a key role in the implementation of a brand new Digital Asset Management system and I made recommendations on how the system would best fit our needs and that was HIPAA Compliant and that offered the right tools for our organization.

Henrik:  Madeline, how does a hospital focusing on innovative pediatric specialty care, world-class research and outstanding medical education use Digital Asset Management?

Madeline:  Here at Shriner’s Hospital Headquarters, we use the Digital Asset Management system to organize all of our marketing materials. That includes our historic photos and videos, our photography for print and social media, our patient videos, commercials, and our consent forms. It’s also used to share files with our designers, our internal departments and externally with our 22 locations, the Shriners temples and our vendors.

Henrik:  What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

Madeline:  One of the challenges in the medical field was finding a system that was HIPAA Compliant and that would safely store and protect our patient data. Another challenge is the change in processes and workflows within a department. When implementing a system, you have to help your users understand the value that the digital asset management system brings to the organization and the cost savings in the reuse of your assets. Over time, users will establish their own workflows and change can be troublesome for some. So it’s very important to offer continuous training either in groups or 1 on 1 so that they can adapt to the new workflow and become comfortable with using the new system.

Madeline:  For our successes, I would say when a user adapts to the new system and you receive positive feedback from your users on how easy it was to locate and share files and how the system helped them reduce time in locating them, and the delivery process. Successes are also streamlining the processes and brand consistency. So we no longer receive requests that are manual and the work requests become automated. That’s definitely a success. It really changes the way teams work in a very positive way.

Henrik:  And what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Madeline:  My advice would be to keep up with the industry changes and how they benefit the organization that you work for. So continue to learn, take classes, join discussion groups and search the Internet. There’s a lot of very helpful information out there and ask a lot of questions. Even though I’d been working in this field for quite some time, I’m always learning from other DAM professionals. I can then take those learnings and apply them in my organization. So always take time to speak with your colleagues about their work and how the DAM system can help them.

Henrik:  Well, thanks, Madeline.

Madeline:  Thanks for having me on.

Henrik:  For more on this, visit anotherdampodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Yaochong Chen on Digital Asset Management

Listen to Yaochong Chen talk about Digital Asset Management

Transcript:

Henrik:  This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, I’m speaking with Yaochong Chen. How are you?

Yaochong:  How are you, Henrik? Nice to meet you.

Henrik: You too. How are you involved with Digital Asset Management (DAM)?

Yaochong:  Well, I was just graduating from King’s College London’s Digital Asset and Media Management Program. In the past one year, I’ve learned a lot about some basic concepts and also some practices used and ideas about how to, if that colleague managed assets. I think this program really helped me to understand how important managing rich media is and also give me a lot of ideas to think critically about how to help more people to better do so.

Henrik:  You started a new Digital Asset Management group. Tell us more about this.

Yaochong:  Okay, well the group I’ve found that is called Digital Asset Management China Connect. I founded this group in May 2018 with two of my friends. The reason why I started this group is because I really want to bring DAM to China. Although we have a lot of Chinese students in this program, actually for them it’s very hard to find a DAM career back to China, which is because most of us [are not] really aware of what DAM is. What I’m going to do is to bring an awareness and also persuade more Chinese companies and organizations to really ponder how to organize and manage their rich media content. In the past one year, what I’ve done is get connected with a lot of DAM experts in the western world and also I’ve held some presentations and meetings with some Chinese students and also some DAM experts. What I’m going to do this year is to do some interviews with some Chinese organizations, especially rich media content intensive companies, to know their conditions about managing rich media and also to think about really implement a digital asset management system or some friends.

Yaochong:  And also maybe do some interviews with some western expert to see if they have some reflections or ideas about the future of DAM’s development in China. So, next year my plan is about to launch a website is DAM China. I hope to use this website to get connected between western experts and the Chinese rich media intensive companies to let China’s companies to now the importance of DAM and at the same time to let in western experts and then maybe vendors and the people to do so to know that China really needs their help to really make their DAM condition better.

Henrik:  What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

Yaochong:  I think in my view, I think challenges are at the same time the potential success. And if we see the whole DAM world, I think one of the challenges is to how to face change and unpredictable things because technology is really developing fast these years. On the one hand, technology will bring more challenges to DAM management because they will be more multiple types of rich media contents and there will be more content devices. But at the same time technology can really help DAM to manage content better. But if we have a closer look about DAM in China, I think the biggest challenge will be to think about how to nurture a Chinese organizations awareness about DAM.

Yaochong:  And there are actually three points I really want to cover. I think they are really some reflections. The first one is about society and culture. I think in China, people with more experience get more priority, which means it’s really hard for some creative and the critical young people to raise their ideas. And I can imagine if some young people go to a company and to say like, “can we implement a DAM system? It will help a lot.” Maybe some more experienced leaders, they don’t really take [this seriously]. And the second one I really want to cover is that I know their are many like Librarian Degrees in Western world, but in China there are less, which means that they don’t really take [this seriously] about how to exactly manage their rich media and digital contents. The third one I think is about Chinese people are really concentrating a lot about developing technology like many hot treads like AI, AR, VR and blockchain things so that they don’t really have the energy at the efforts to really think about rich media content and how to manage them. So I think about this challenge, if I mean we can really think about some ways to persuade them to do so then there will be a really potential success and more footprints for them in the whole world.

Henrik:  What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Yaochong:  Well, I think I want to cover two points. One is the problem solving and critical attitudes. And the other is the entrepreneurial attitudes because I mean everything is developing and DAM will also to the future as well. So it’s very important to look forward and to see about the future like to really be open and see the technologies that is going to be developed in the future and to really think about how to solve the problems that are brought by all kinds of technology. I think the entrepreneurial attitude is what I really want to give to those potential DAM management people in China because I mean, we still lack the awareness of DAM at present and it is very important for us to stand up and raise the idea and get the courage to talk about this with all kinds of organizations and really bringing this idea there.

Henrik:  Well, thank you so much for your insights on this.

Yaochong:  Thank you. Thank you too. Nice to talk to you.

Henrik:  You too. For more on this, visit anotherpodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.

Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts,  RadioPublic, RSS, Spotify or TuneIn

Need a Digital Asset Management Consultant?

Another DAM Consultancy can help. Contact us today.


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Another DAM Podcast interview with Ron Gill on Digital Asset Management

Listen to Ron Gill discuss 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 Ron Gill. Ron, how are you?

Ron Gill:  Hey, how is it going, Henrik?

Henrik de Gyor:  Good. Ron, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Ron Gill:  That’s a good question. Like lot of my colleagues, Digital Asset Management was something that you kind of wander into. So in my case, I started out as a graphic designer with a fine arts painting background and throughout my career as a graphic designer all the way up to art director, I was always involved with the management of large archives of assets, whether it be for the architectural firms that I was working for, the advertising firms that I was working for throughout the cycle. And this is before Digital Asset Management and even became a industry, let alone a descriptor for what it is that we do. It was a series of organizing and making these assets useful within the company. So as the tools got better and as the systems got more elaborate, I basically had a trial by fire, a learning experience from the ground up. It was learning about how these systems are being used and how I could best implement them in the company’s workflow. So as I progressed, I became more and more involved and roughly around 2008 I became more heavily vested in Digital Asset Management. I kind of a made that my focus over design. So that’s how I got involved in Digital Asset Management, in the Digital Asset Management space.

Henrik de Gyor:  What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

Ron Gill:  They are quite a few challenges. And there are also a number of successes that I’ve seen and I had. The challenges I think are, they’re varied actually. So silos, information stored in silos and teams not being up to cooperate with each other are some of the biggest challenges because in each, in each silo you have system, a subject matter experts that understand the content for their silos and they don’t necessarily communicate too well even though, for example, if you’re doing or you’re working for a marketing organization and the company is large enough so you’ll have different wings or different teams working on different aspects. They all might be doing different things, but in the same industry or sharing the same goal. So getting all these silos together is one of the biggest challenges and getting people to recognize that I think is the biggest challenge for Digital Asset Management. In the beginning, it’s getting a company sign on and higher-ups to pay for the system because it’s not something that you can get overnight.

Ron Gill:  It’s not something that’s going to happen, you know, by pulling the software off the shelf and then plugging it into your system. It’s something that takes thorough investigation. It takes an understanding of how the company is using assets and it’s understanding the needs of the end user. So those are the biggest challenges that, I think in Digital Asset Management. Of course, there’s a number of splinter challenges that come up from that way, you know, adding metadata and who gets to add metadata, adoption, so on, so forth. In the beginning, the biggest challenge is getting everybody on board and understanding the baseline workflow that needs to happen inside the Digital Asset Management system.

Ron Gill:  Now, so far, successes, successes wouldn’t be obviously getting that challenge, taking care of, so being able to find what the company would need in so far as their workflow is the biggest success I think you can have initially. Finding the system that is going to work for multiple teams and the system that will best make their output and workflow more efficient is the biggest success. Once you have a working DAM in place, those successes will come.

Henrik de Gyor:  What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Ron Gill:  Advice I’d like to share with people aspiring to become professionals. There’s not too much information online or anything that you can glean through the Internet. There is some resources that you can, forums. I think Deb Fanslow has a great one, DAM Peeps. This is for non-vendors. It is a invite only Google group or forum and it’s a good resource that just came up. And it’s good to learn as much as you possibly can and there’s so many industries that DAM touches. So obviously going to big events like Henry Stewart or going to DAM Meetups will expose you to different areas, different industries. I mean I’m still talking to people that are also Digital Asset Managers, but I’ve never met before or I have, I didn’t know that industry was using DAM in that fashion. So getting out there and, and meeting new people and seeing how they’re using DAM to help their company and help their workflows is a vital resource. I mean, it’ll help you tremendously in, in what you’re doing and you’re trying to achieve.

Henrik de Gyor:  Well, Thanks, Ron.

Ron Gill:  All right. Excellent. Thank you.

Henrik de Gyor:  For more on this, visit anotherdampodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, please email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.

 

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Natalie Daller 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 Natalie Daller.

Natalie, how are you?

Natalie Daller:  I’m great. How are you?

Henrik de Gyor:  Great. Natalie, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Natalie Daller:  I thought I’d start with a little bit of background information on myself. I have a photographic background. I started off in analog darkrooms with projectors and mixing chemistry, and from there I transitioned into a digital retouching role, working a lot for many, many years in Photoshop. From there, I moved into an asset management and permissions role at a museum, and today I work as the global administrator of my company’s DAM system.

In my current role, I’ve worked for my employer in some kind of digital assessment management role for a little over six years now. I started off as an image coordinator and recently was promoted to Digital Asset Specialist. The impetus for the new role has a lot to do with the elevated importance of Digital Asset Management within my company’s Martec landscape. While Digital Asset Management started off as an internal process for improved efficiency, it’s evolved into a method for broader brand control and asset delivery to our external partners, which include a body of approximately 40,000 potential end-users.

Henrik de Gyor:  Natalie, how does a multinational, multilevel marketing company use Digital Asset Management?

Natalie Daller:  Well, as you mentioned, we’re multinational. I’m based in Chicago where headquarters is located, but we also have international offices in Canada and Germany. As an internal tool, our DAM system provides easy access to our final brand-approved assets to all of our coworkers, no matter where in the world they’re located. As a direct sales company, our sales force is comprised of, as I mentioned, about 40,000 consultants and our consultants need on-brand assets at their disposal to use to market their businesses, and beginning in 2015, we were able to leverage our DAM to provide curated collections of beautifully photographed and designed marketing assets, aligned to our brand.

Doing this is mutually beneficial. We’re able to have more control over our brand, but we’re also freeing up time for our consultants so that they can focus their energy on activities that are most important to their success. Digital Asset Management enables us to provide and continually improve upon this service by looking at the analytics that we find within the DAM system, measuring the success of our campaigns, and then, in turn, tailoring our strategies and content based on the asset performance.

Henrik de Gyor:  Natalie, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

Natalie Daller:  There’s a lot of challenges, I’d say. Keeping up with the volume of assets is definitely a big one. We’re able to produce a lot, but then ensuring that everything’s making it into the DAM system and that we’re also seeing on top of archiving. That’s a big problem, the challenge I would say, so that you’re certain everything that’s available, that’s accessible, is still relevant, and then, of course, being diligent and adding useful metadata, you can upload and upload and upload, but if you don’t take the time to actually add meaningful keywords and your users can’t find the assets, then you’re wasting a lot of time.

I would say also, and this is probably most important, is empathizing with your users and looking for ways to continually make improvements so that you’re ensuring your users are finding what they need with very minimal effort. So it’s important to listen to your users. We like to conduct user testing, stay open-minded, and understand that what worked a few years ago may no longer work today, and needs to be updated.

Lastly, and this is something that I’ve really been focused on last year and again going into 2018, is ROI and demonstrating the value of a Digital Asset Management system, so we came up with a formal KPI, a key performance indicator, in 2017 to evaluate our DAM and ensure that it’s best in class and that we were doing everything needed in order to make it useful to our users, and that KPI that we were measuring was what we called our unaided asset request. That means that our goal is to have 82% of our users find assets without the assistance of myself or my counterpart. And what that meant is that 82% each month of all assets downloaded came from requests made through the DAM system.

We did really, really well. Really, really well. But then we still heard lots of complaints, so though while our users were able to find their assets, it was taking them a very long time to find them, so we were changing our KPI for 2018 and we’re looking to measure the ROI using a search to download conversion ratio. So we’ll look at the number of searches our users’ input before they, in turn, download something. Hopefully, we’ll be able to make improvements with our Digital Asset Management system that will decrease the amount of time that our users need or takes them in order to find what they’re looking for.

Henrik de Gyor:  That’s great. And so the idea is to be more self-service, as far as search is concerned. Searching and finding what they need.

Natalie Daller:  Yeah. We’re not bottlenecks, because obviously if all the requests are coming into us, we can’t immediately turn them around, so we don’t want to be bottlenecks, but then we want people to be able to have a very good user experience whenever they’re looking for their assets.

Henrik de Gyor:  And having them actually find their own assets versus you finding them for them.

Natalie Daller:  Yes.

Henrik de Gyor:  Got it. Yeah, yeah. That should be the goal for most DAM systems, in my opinion.

Natalie Daller:  Yeah. There’s really no point if it’s just a huge cloud storage system for the two asset coordinators to go and pull down assets for everyone.

Henrik de Gyor:  Completely agreed. Yep. And, Natalie, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Natalie Daller:  The first thing that popped into my head when I thought of this question is Digital Asset Management is far more exciting than it sounds on the surface. I know when I first took a job in Digital Asset Management, I don’t think that I was that enthusiastic about the prospects. It just seemed like a natural next step from imagery touching. And that’s what, I think, it was supposed to be was like a middle step before I bounced onto something else. But I’ve completely fallen in love with it and it’s a lot more exciting than it sounds on the surface.

There’s a lot of opportunities to impact user experiences and to think creatively to solve problems, and then it’s important, like I mentioned earlier, to keep an open mind and demonstrate empathy, and to remember that there’s no one size fits all solution.

Henrik de Gyor: Well thanks, Natalie.

Natalie Daller:  Thank you.

Henrik de Gyor:  For more on this, visit anotherdampodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.

Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic, Spotify, TuneIn, and wherever you find podcasts.

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