Henrik de Gyor: [0:02] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I am Henrik de Gyor. Today, I’m speaking with Lauren Philson.
Lauren, how are you?
Lauren Philson: [0:11] I’m great, Henrik. Thanks for having me.
Henrik: [0:13] Lauren, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Lauren: [0:16] I am involved, typically, with the implementation of new technology in an organization or a company. A lot of that involves analyzing current processes and systems, and then working with the staff and individuals on optimizing those. Taking the organization through vendor selection, building out specs for integration and potential tools, and working with them in terms of change management.
[0:44] I currently am with The Rockefeller Foundation, working with them to upgrade their current system. In the past, I’ve worked in production environments and had a little bit of experience with broadcast as well. Varying ranges.
Henrik: [1:00] How does one of America’s oldest private Foundations use Digital Asset Management?
Lauren: [1:07] The Rockefeller Foundation, as you can imagine, has a very wide reach ‑‑ global organization. We have thousands of grant recipients and external partners that we are working with around the world.
[1:19] A lot of our media traffic centralizes around the acquisition of photography, video that’s coming in, and also making that content available for the creation with our external partners in terms of publication on the work that we’re doing.
[1:35] All of the media that we receive just represents a very, very small piece of a rather large puzzle that we are working on and solving some of the world’s biggest problems. For a 100‑year‑old foundation, Rockefeller is highly innovative and is committed to innovation as part of their mission and role.
[1:54] They really value inter‑connectivity. For that reason, they’re currently placing a huge emphasis on story telling that allows us to use media ‑‑ to use words ‑‑ to provide a context. Each of those little bits of the puzzle can later add up and demonstrate what the larger strides that we are making in these initiatives.
[2:16] There’s also the component of archiving and cultural preservation. Rockefeller has a very impressive archive center in upstate New York. We are not fully connected with them. There’s been a chasm as most organizations experience with DAM and with Digital in general.
[2:36] What we’re doing is working and laying the groundwork so that digital files that are important to history and are important to cultural preservation are able to be more easily routed to those archives.
Henrik: [2:48] What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Lauren: [2:53] In general, with both of those ‑‑ the challenges and the successes ‑‑ have usually revolved around governance and user adoption. No matter what the end goal of an organization or a company is, we do see common threads of challenges that come up. Often times, I’ve seen DAM go from being a departmental solution to an enterprise solution, literally, overnight.
[3:15] Priorities change pretty rampantly. Managing expectations and being smart about how one scales and on boards. Just, in general, having a very positive campaign around the tool. Without the users, you can have the best metadata schema, you can have the fanciest tools and integration. you can spend a ton of money on top of one system, but without your users, you’re bound to have some issues.
[3:41] It’s really remarkable once you do have all the individuals that will be involved with the system in alignment how quickly you can see a project turn around in terms of success.
Henrik: [3:53] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Lauren: [3:59] Particularly for folks that are looking into Digital Asset Management and venturing into this field, my biggest piece of advice would be to tap into the community. I’ve never met a group of individuals that are more willing and helpful to share information and knowledge. The reason for that is that there is no single formula to solving the problems that come with DAM.
[4:22] It’s an ongoing and ever growing puzzle to solve for us. Tapping into that wealth of knowledge, building the network and being able to apply others’ experiences to your current situation is the most valuable tool that you can have.
Tapping into that wealth of knowledge, building the network and being able to apply others’ experiences to your current situation is the most valuable tool that you can have.
Henrik: [4:37] Thanks, Lauren.
Lauren: [4:38] Great!
Henrik: [4:39] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, log on to AnotherDAMblog.com. For this and 150 other podcast [episodes], go to AnotherDAMpodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions about Digital Asset Management, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com.
In October 2013, I gave a presentation on ‘The People Aspects of Digital Asset Management (DAM)’ during the Createasphere DAM Conference in New York City. This presentation was audio recorded so it could be shared with you. Enjoy.
Transcript:
Henrik de Gyor: [0:01] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking about the people aspects of Digital Asset Management. Here is part two of the Createasphere DAM conference presentation I gave in New York in October 2013. Enjoy.
[0:20] You may need a gatekeeper. Most people don’t consider that when they get a DAM. They think that it’s just technology, it’s just software. No, that’s wrong. It’s not just software, and it’s not just technology. It involves people, process, technology and information. If you don’t have all four working together, you don’t have a working DAM.
[0:43] The other thing that I’m going to throw in there is, are we the new Mechanical Turks? How many of you are familiar with the Mechanical Turks? Not just the service that’s available today, but the chess playing tool from many years ago, where there was actually a skilled chess player underneath and nobody knew how the system worked.
[1:04] It just had a… “robot”. Not really, underneath there was a human, someone who did all the work underneath. No one realized what was under there. We may be the new Mechanical Turks. Are we? DAM is not a game, so not really. It involves more skills than just chess and it takes far more patience than chess.
[1:31] People don’t understand DAM, and it takes often a lot of explanations. Everyone who’s worked in DAM long enough understands that they have to educate a lot of people in and around and across their organization, and whoever is going to touch their DAM. Make them understand why this is important for the organization, what value it serves to them, not just to me because I don’t count. It’s what the organization needs, and they need to be able to find their assets, otherwise you’re wasting money.
[2:09] Your DAM is only as good as its metadata and how well it’s been curated, and how well it’s cataloged to find those assets over and over again. There may be less reasons. You may have heard of others why we are not the Mechanical Turks, we may find it insulting. There’s a lot to consider in DAM, way too many acronyms and terms to consider and things to think about.
[2:36] Back to the who, there’s plenty of different roles to play within organizations that are involved with Digital Asset Management, at least when you’re starting out. These are all different roles that play a part, whether it’s temporary or permanent within your organization.
[2:54] A DAM shouldn’t be really stagnant. It should evolve with your organization, and the people should evolve too. That may take significant change management amongst all of you, and your organization itself. There may be resistance because [sarcastically] people love change, right? No, they usually don’t.
[3:16] One of the phenomena I’ve seen is, people are volunteered for DAM, or on rare occasions, people volunteer themselves to do DAM. Typically, they are volunteered and typically it’s not their core competency…what they were hired for.
[3:32] A designer or marketer or photographer or PM, they didn’t really sign up when they were first hired to do that. What is their passion and why would they stay through all this pain? Anyone who’s worked through DAM knows how much pain you have to go through to make people understand and show them the value, and explain it over and over and over again, and illustrate why this is important.
[4:02] You can show them the numbers, you can illustrate why it’s important to them, how it’s important to them, how they could use it themselves and how it could make their lives easier. They have to understand it themselves, otherwise you’re not going to win and you’ll keep on explaining it over and over and over again. Then, you’ll keep burning money until that issue is resolved.
[4:24] There’s often a lot of guidance, there’s a lot of training and it’s not just training once by a vendor and then they run away, but ongoing support has to exist for a DAM. Otherwise, you will not get the adoption, the user adoption of a system. You will stand up a system and it will be what’s called a ‘shelf baby’. How many of you are familiar with what a shelf baby means?
[4:44] Yes, it’s one of those systems that you pay lots of money, you put lots of care, lots of nurturing into it and then it just sits there and nobody uses it. That’s a big waste of money, right? It’s not a ‘check box’, you want the system to be used that’s why you invested in it. You want people to be able to find their assets. That’s an investment in time.
[5:05] If you are not tagging your assets and you are accumulating more and more every day, that means you have to tag those new assets almost every day, appropriately, so you can find that content within those assets. Not just, it’s a photo! How many photos do I have? 20,000. Well, I’ll just scroll endlessly.
[5:24] [laughter]
Henrik: [5:25] Bad idea. That doesn’t scale, right? It’s not scalable. You’ll just continue scrolling endlessly. It doesn’t work. Some organizations think that works. No, it doesn’t. Those solutions often don’t scale either, so there’s a lot to do there.
[5:45] There’s also the question, do I need additional headcount? Well, it depends on the volume of assets that you have. If you have a set number of files and you upload them, and you never have more assets…
[5:58] [laughter]
Henrik: [6:00] …maybe not, but if you accumulate on regular basis a small volume that it takes N number of people to tag and this is something that you have to measure. How long does it take someone to add the appropriate metadata so you can find it again?
[6:13] Your user groups, meaning the people who are actually going to use the system. Not the business people who are just going to pay for it and say, “OK, what business value is this bringing me? Why keep paying these $100,000 bills every year”? Or the IT people say, “It’s still up, go ahead and use it. It’s still working. No one’s touching it but it’s still working.” It’s often the creatives, right?
[6:37] It’s often the creatives that are creating more and more files, but they don’t like metadata. How many creatives are in the room? OK, a few. How many of you who are creatives love spreadsheets? OK.
[6:50] [laughter] Survival.
Henrik: [6:53] Fair, fair, yes, so aside from the one…
[6:57] [laughter]
Henrik: [7:02] …yes, sometimes you have to do what’s needed, right? A lot of creatives prefer to create files for some reason, because that’s what they were hired for and that’s their passion, right? Getting creatives to actually do that tagging work is next to very rare, to put it nicely, because they don’t want to.
[7:23] They don’t want to…they’ll pretend they can’t spell, they…
[7:28] [laughter]
Henrik: [7:29] …won’t spell, they won’t use any instructions, they won’t read, they’ll pretend they can’t. I’ve seen it all, so DAM hiring is quite often the need. Your options are, learn what’s out there, there’s more and more resources now. One of the reasons I created my blog is because there wasn’t enough information in the user and administrator perspective of DAM. That’s why I started blogging, because there wasn’t enough information.
[8:00] There is more now, not enough, but there is more now. I blog on a very regular basis about what is needed by the DAM community, not just us, the users, but the vendors, and the readers are users and vendors and everyone else who kind of cares. There’s plenty out there to talk about and I’m not the only blogger, I recently did a talk with some other bloggers and there’ll be more.
[8:29] Bloggers are just one part of it. There are also websites like CMSWire, like the DAM Foundation, the DAM Coalition, a bunch of others that have information about DAM that is very useful, so read about it. Watch webinars from all the different vendors, not just your preferred one. Some of them are more useful than others, especially the ones that are less salesy.
[8:52] Network with others. In New York, we have the luxury of having the world’s largest [DAM] meetup group, which you’ll meet tonight, from 5:00 to 6:30. We have 570 members, 106 of them are coming tonight. I’m one of the co‑organizers, Michael in the back is another one. Chad, if he’s in the room is, is the founder.
[9:13] We doubled the size of our membership this year, so there’s plenty of networking available and we video record every session whenever we have a panel. So worldwide, even if you are not in New York or your schedule is busy, you have the availability to watch our videos and they’re on YouTube for free.
[9:33] Use consultants as necessary. I’m a DAM consultant, full disclosure.
[9:39] [laughter]
Henrik: [9:40] …and there is DAM hiring. There are more and more DAM jobs, there’s about a hundred almost every day available. You go on indeed.com, on monster.com, dice.com, you can find DAM jobs and you can also post DAM jobs just make sure you know what you’re looking for. When I talk to recruiters, most of the time they don’t know anything beyond a req. Fix that.
[10:03] [laughter]
Henrik: [10:04] Know what you’re looking for yourself. It takes people obviously. To do the research, to prioritize, to make the decisions, to analyze the information because the analysis isn’t done by a machine, to create processes and actually follow them, to hold those accountable, usually everybody, and to select the right system for your organization, and not to over‑complicate, but to simplify, and to do the DAM work…
[10:38] [laughter]
Henrik: [10:39] …or to fail or to succeed. It’s up to you.
How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
How does an organization focused on gems use a DAM?
What do you do to encourage user adoption of the DAM?
What advice would you like to give to DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM Professionals?
Transcript:
Henrik de Gyor: [0:01] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset
Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, I’m speaking with Judy Colbert.
[0:08] Judy, how are you? Judy Colbert: [0:10] Hi. I’m fine, thanks, Henrik. Henrik: [0:12] Judy, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management? Judy: [0:15] Well, I’m administrator of GIA’s DAM system. I deal with the daily
operation for the system on the front end. The technical side is handled by our
IT department. [0:26] My team, the visual resources library, consists of two catalogers,
a digital resources specialist, a visual resources librarian and me.
[0:36] When we began our DAM project around 2002, I was co-project manager.
With the involvement of committee members from various departments, we
decided on a vendor, came up with policies and procedures in using the DAM.
We, also, developed our property models and taxonomy at that time.
[0:56] After implementation, the visual resources library took over as caretakers
of DAM. I had a smaller staff in the beginning and did much more of the importing
of assets and editing of metadata. But as my team grew, more of my time’s
spent in management. Henrik: [1:13] How is an organization focused on gems use a DAM? Judy: [1:18] One of the more important things we do at GIA is teach gemology,
and the jewelry manufacturing arts. It’s very visual and you need a lot of images
to teach students about the large variety of gemstones, how to identify them
and how to determine their quality. [1:34] The Gemological Institute of America
develops its own courses in print and, more recently, in eLearning. We have staff
and freelance photographers who produce a lot of images. They need to be
organized and made accessible, not only to our education department, but to
marketing, PR, the laboratory, and the research departments, too.
[1:57] They all use images for a variety of uses, such as for scientific journals, education
catalogs, lectures and instructional use. Henrik: [2:06] Great. What do you do to encourage user adoption of the DAM? Judy: [2:11] That’s a good question and one we continually ask ourselves how to
do. One thing we start off with is to provide training to new users. At first, because
it was a larger number, we held group training sessions. Now, we mostly
have one on one training. [2:28] It’s really important to get users to feel comfortable
in using DAM, especially if they’ve never used it before. We try to simplify
and not overwhelm them right away with all the features that are available in
DAM. We show them what they need to do to get started, and if they want to
know more or have a higher level of access, we can instruct them more then.
[2:50] Other ways we’ve tried to gain user adoption is by communicating with
our users by way of newsletters and a blog. We’ve also held special events, like
awards ceremonies, to acknowledge our power users. Photo identification socials
to identify unknown people in old photos, and open houses to give demos
and answer some questions. Henrik: [3:13] Excellent. I have a link to your blog on my blog, AnotherDAMblog.com. What is the URL to your blog? Judy: [3:21] It’s dam4gia.blogspot.com. It’s mainly, an internal blog for our own
users, but people from the outside are welcome to view it if they like. Henrik: [3:36] Excellent. There’s a lot of nice imagery on there. Judy: [3:38] Well, thank you. Henrik: [3:39] What advice would you like to give to DAM professionals and
people aspiring to become DAM professionals? Judy: [3:45] Read up, learn from other DAM professionals, and make a project
plan before you take the leap. When we started our project, there wasn’t as
much information available as there is now. Take advantage of learning from
other people’s experiences and mistakes. [3:59] Start small and build up. It can
be very overwhelming to try to do it all at once.
[4:05] Finally, be flexible and willing to adapt. Changes will happen. Henrik: [4:11] Excellent. Well, thank you, Judy. Judy: [4:12] Oh, you’re welcome. Henrik: [4:14] For more on Digital Asset Management, log onto AnotherDAMblog.com. Thanks again.
Another DAM Podcast 