Rich media and digital content is
pervasive in organizations and continues to grow exponentially. Coupled with
today’s challenging economic environment, enterprises are focusing on
operational excellence, cost-cutting, and Return On Investment (ROI) to help
maintain profitability. Digital Asset Management (DAM) is rapidly evolving from
a departmental tool for archive and library management to an enterprise-wide
solution for workflow and collaboration. Industry-leading organizations
consider DAM solutions as key strategic components of a broader creative and
intellectual property initiative that is capable of: n Becoming a revenue
stream by leveraging digital assets across multiple distribution and
communication channels n Reducing total cost of ownership by reusing and
repurposing rich media assets n Delivering greater operational efficiency with
easy access and interaction to information and content n Achieving operational
effectiveness through collaboration, workflow, and process automation n Meeting
and maintaining compliance and legal standards with audit trails and reports
Explosive growth in the DAM marketplace and many different products, platforms,
and capabilities challenge organizations’ knowledge of what will work best and
how to proactively align programs with the company’s strategy for managing
digital content, branding, video, and marketing content. It’s not just a list
of features and functions. Considerations of implementation, extensibility,
vendor strategy, and commitment are important when evaluating which particular
product or solutions will be the best for your organization. Implementing and
deploying enterprise solutions for internal and external users is a complex art
and involves many strategic and technical decisions. Organizations make significant
investments to ensure the solution they deploy meets the needs of their
business community and stakeholders. These 10 steps are a collection of lessons
learned from the many different implementations of OpenText Media Management
for a variety of customers and industries. It provides guidelines to ensure a
smooth, successful implementation and greater user adoption of DAM in your
enterprise.
1. Identify the Right
Product for Your Organization
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
or enterprise. There is an increasing trend to cloud-based systems as
solutions are offered by some DAM vendors. In addition, open source solutions
from consultants and system integrators offer custom products and
implementations to customers. Deciding to go with these products versus an
enterprise solution depends on many factors. One key area is the organization’s
available infrastructure and IT management capabilities and the inclination to
outsource such operations outside the company. It also depends on the storage
and usage needs of the DAM system, the network capacity, and the distribution
of users. The SaaS model, cloud-based storage, and security of content are
maturing. The relatively low upfront investment, faster implementation cycle,
and outsourced IT should be compared to the ability to customize and extend the
system based on the organization’s strategic goals.
Hosting or on-premise.
Again, this decision is primarily based on the internal IT capabilities of the
organization. Some companies have a fully functional IT organization and
infrastructure and prefer to “own” their systems, while others like to delegate
the management of the infrastructure and products to external sources.
Customers should evaluate both options and decide based on their use cases and
internal IT policies and procedures.
Understand IT rules, policies,
and constraints. Many organizations have strict policies around their IT
infrastructure, including access to external sources, firewalls, and data
transfer rules. The project team should understand the IT policies so that the
system can be built to adhere to internal standards. For example, companies
have very strict policies concerning external user access to File Transfer
Protocol (FTP) sites or to provide an unsecured HTTP access to internal applications,
typically requiring users to be authenticated via a VPN or a Portal. While
designing the system, such policies should be considered in order to eliminate
issues in the future.
2. Get Leadership Buy-In
Leadership buy-in Successful
projects require leadership buy-in and an executive sponsor. This is key to
getting the project up and running and to sustain future investment in
maintaining a viable and effective DAM solution. Having the support and active
participation of the executive team is necessary in getting the essential
budget, resolving interdepartmental issues, and providing a sense of
reassurance to the project team. It elevates the visibility of the project in
the organization, impacting adoption and furthering the success of the project.
Create a business plan. A
formal business plan outlines what the DAM system will accomplish—its value to
the organization—quantifies it, and then justifies the investment. The starting
point is documenting the way things are done now and what it costs in terms of
time, effort, and resources. With this as a baseline, you can project any
cost-savings in time, effort, and resources when the DAM system is deployed. A
business plan maps out where you’re at, where you’re going, and the plan to get
there, and serves as a blueprint for the entire project.
3. Build a Project Team
Include business, IT, and
users A well-managed DAM implementation typically involves three main
groups—business, IT, and user community. This ensures that all of them are in
lock step agreement on what is being built and can also resolve issues as they
surface. Building a system in isolation will result in poor adoption by the
users (a sense of thrusting it down their throats) and eventually will lead to
failure of the project.
Become a champion of the DAM
cause. Implementing a DAM system requires a culture change in an
organization. Change management and adoption is usually the greatest obstacle
in a successful DAM project. The fact is that most are resistant to change,
being accustomed to manual processes, home-grown solutions, and familiar
creation and management practices of digital content. The project team has to
be the champion and cheerleader to help people discover the productivity and
quality improvements DAM offers. It is important to get the user community
involved early, listen to their worries and concerns, and ensure they are heard
and addressed. Remember that this project will fundamentally change the way
people work in the organization, so the rollout should be carefully planned,
communicated, and executed.
Create a Digital Asset Manager
role. During the initial stages of the implementation and rollout, someone
should “own” the system and become the point of contact for issues and plan
training for users to ensure that assets are being ingested and tagged
properly. This role is critically important to the implementation and ongoing
success of the project.
4. Implement in Phases
Leverage and address lessons
learned An agile approach to implementation means smoother rollout and the
ability to test feature based on the valuable feedback provided by users during
the process. DAM implementations are complex and include integrations with
internal systems, data models, product master data sets, naming conventions,
and existing processes. A phased implementation allows you to mitigate project
risks.
Roll out to new groups in
phases. If you are considering a system for ten or more groups within your
organization, identify the three or four departments that include quick
adopters and have a mix of simple and complex requirements. This will allow you
to establish some quick wins and then expand the deployment to the other
departments using the first phase to assist in the follow-on training.
5. Use the Right
Implementation Partner
Leverage a vendor or partner
with credible experience in implementation. Typically, vendors have
extensive experience in designing, implementing, and deploying their products.
For example, the OpenText Media Management professional services team has
performed a wide range of DAM implementations for more than 14 years and has
extensive experience working with a large variety of companies and customers.
We also work with our partner channels and have many successful
implementations, continuously improving and enhancing our partners’ abilities
to build and deploy our solutions. Build a team that can eventually take
ownership of DAM. DAM solutions are dynamic and flexible, meaning they don’t
remain static.
Build a team that knows your
operation and where it plans to go, and build use cases to apply to the DAM
solution. This team should be technically savvy in order to understand and
customize the system. Look for ways to streamline and automate processes,
integrate and share data with other systems, and provide users with advanced
tools such as advanced search templates and casual browse/download
capabilities. Consider security, compliance, and reporting that will be needed
for the future.
6. Understand the Vendor
Roadmap and Interact Regularly
Know the product roadmap and provide
feedback on new features and trends and technology. Vendors often provide
periodic briefings on the product roadmap through interactive forums such as
customer advisory boards, webinars, and social groups. At OpenText, we have
private and sponsored user groups for our Media Management solution and regular
roadmap webinars to share current product development plans. We also have an
active Customer Advisory Board as our listening post to the DAM community to
direct feedback on new trends in the market, changes to business processes, and
pain points. All these activities help drive new features in upcoming releases.
Customers who continue to be involved and interact with the vendor product team
are in a better position to know what is coming, plan for it, and achieve
success in the long run.
7. Establish Governance
Policies
Bulk and ongoing consumption
of assets. Customers are surprised at how challenging it is to get digital
content into the system. During initial implementation, customers typically deal
with multiple versions of digital content in various formats, distributed to
one or more internal backup disks and network drives. In addition, content is
also received from external agencies and partners, and this content needs to be
processed and consumed. Establishing a well thought out plan to streamline and
automate consumption is key part of implementation planning.
Tag assets with proper
metadata. The phrase “garbage in, garbage out” applies to DAM systems.
Metadata is a critical component to manage and find digital assets in the
system. An asset ingested with bad metadata makes it challenging to find and
correctly tag later. The governance policy should clearly define mandatory
metadata and have a librarian or power user review incoming assets for
consistency before the asset is released for consumption. This will ensure that
the assets can be found by users accurately and metadata, taxonomy, and
descriptions are normalized. The better the metadata definition, the easier it
is to find assets and reduce user frustration.
Implement benchmarks,
auditability, metrics, and reporting. Review the system periodically in the
initial stages to make sure that it is being utilized by the user population.
Some key metrics that would help in tracking user adoption are:
- · Number of logins per day
- · Number of searches conducted per day
- · Number of assets downloaded
- · Number of concurrent users in the system
8. Get Users on Board
Train users. Effective use
of any software requires training. A comprehensive, quality training program
results in higher user adoption. Even though DAM systems are intuitive, some
level of training is needed to ensure users understand the feature sets, know
how to do their day-to-day job in a DAM-enabled world, and can collaborate with
other users. In cases where the system is customized, the training curriculum
should also focus on the custom workflows and use cases so that users are
familiar with the built system. Documenting your use cases, policies, and
procedures helps train new users. To maximize your success, practice ongoing
training.
Identify power users and
empower them. Power users in different departments are the primary drivers
of adoption in their group. Giving them responsibilities such as metadata
validation, security management for their groups and participation in internal
meetings on the project get them involved and connected so that feedback from
users is heard and addressed quickly. It also serves as an effective marketing
tool for the company since they are in touch with the internal user community
and can become a champion of the DAM effort within the organization.
Arrange periodic reviews with
key users. In addition to identifying power users in various departments,
management should hold periodic meetings with the key business users to hear
their concerns and requirements. This maintains momentum for the initiative,
allows issues to be identified and addressed early, and also looks for creative
ways to expand adoption within the organization. In some cases, mandating
adoption may be required.
9. Integrate DAM with
internal systems
Integrate DAM with business,
operations, creative, and production teams. DAM systems offer more value to
an organization when integrated with other systems, rather than just a
standalone system. For instance, integrating DAM with a SAP® Customer
Relationship Management (CRM) application provides a way to store product shots
and repurpose them in the SAP portal, and for DAM, to acquire metadata from
product master data systems in SAP. The synergies achieved allow for more
effective brand control since the portal systems now have access to current,
approved versions of brand assets and relevant metadata in DAM. Another key use
case for integration is with creative systems. Several DAM vendors provide
native integration with Adobe® Creative Suite® products and complex video
editing programs. Such integrations facilitate users’ ability to easily create,
edit, and save content directly into a DAM system and also perform review and
approval cycles seamlessly.
10. Establish a DAM
community
DAM and social media.
Social media in the enterprise facilitates improved collaboration and
communication between diverse groups and geographically distributed employees.
Several DAM vendors now provide social media tools as part of the DAM solution,
which allows for greater collaboration, tagging, ability to view/comment on
content residing in DAM, and a visually engaging interface that their users can
use without any extensive training. Viewing, commenting, sharing, and
interacting with people and content in real-time accelerates the production,
packaging, and distribution of content.
Establish a viable DAM
community. Creating a community using social media tools for DAM enhances
and accelerates adoption of the application throughout the enterprise. Many
users are already familiar with the social media tools for the web, and having
an internal system allows users to interact and collaborate on content, helping
to increase adoption.
A core strategic investment
From what started off as mainly an archival solution, DAM has taken center
stage as a core strategic investment for large and small enterprises. DAM
connects people, processes, and technology, amplifying workplace productivity
and increasing the value of your digital media, your brand, and your
organization. As technology continues to move forward, keeping up with the
latest changes is difficult. Be diligent in your investigation and plans and
you will reap great rewards from your investment with a successful DAM
implementation.
Source: http://mimage.opentext.com/
