Let us say you already have an established DAM solution within your organization. You have a metadata schema. You have assets with metadata in the DAM. You have established workflows using the DAM for your business needs. You know the DAM is being used by people in the organization.
Now how can you measure the progress of the DAM? This can be done in several ways:
- How many active DAM users do you have?
- How many departments or groups in your organization use the DAM? Who does not? Why not?
- Who are the most active groups or users?
- How many assets are being uploaded (imported) to the DAM? Each day? Each week? Each month? Each year?
- How many assets are metatagged (i.e. applying metadata to assets either before or after upload to the DAM) per hour? per day? per week?
- How many assets are being downloaded from the DAM? Each day? Each week? Each month? Each year?
- What type of asset is the most popular download from the DAM? Photographs? Graphics? Video? (You do use the DAM for more than one type of asset, right?)
- When does the activity in the DAM peak? What time of the day? What is most active month of the year? Do you know why this period is so active? There is usually a business need being resolved.
- Where are the most active DAM users located geographically? If you can locate them, congratulate them on being the most active DAM users and find out why they are the most active DAM users. They probably did not even know this themselves. More on this topic later.
- How else can you measure the ROI from the DAM?
When you selected the DAM solution, did it come with a reporting feature? Can you generate reports directly from the DAM to answer these questions listed above? Hopefully, the DAM did come with this feature so it should not be too hard to filter reports generated from the DAM and yield these answers to give you measurable results. Just as people may file weekly reports, they may have ways to measure their progress. If these ways to measure progress are consistent, you can gather metrics (not the metric system, but rather quantifiable measurements) to report on the progress of the DAM regularly to stakeholders. Once the DAM has been used for a while, many people are amazed by what information is generated by these reports. Surprisingly, many people at first do not realize the extent of the DAM activity which these reports expose, even when it is increased by:
- Established workflows using the DAM
- Appropriate access given to DAM users
- Training and support on the use of the DAM
- Assets with metadata in the DAM
- An increase in user adoption of the DAM
Do you reward the reuse of assets in the DAM? Consider annual recognition or even awarding the most active users and “re-users” (people who have appropriately reused the most number of assets in a year) from the DAM. Give them company-wide recognition. Why would you embarrass employees like that? This recognition may not sound like a big deal at first (even to the employee), but:
- Using the DAM, they saved the organization measurable amounts of money every time they reused or re-purposed an asset from the DAM because:
- They spent less time looking for the needed asset compared to other places the asset might be hiding within the organization. This frees up employee time to accomplish more and/or produce better results.
- They did not have to create nor acquire (buy) that asset again because they found it again in one centralized location (the DAM).
- This is one of the easiest way to get more user adoption. (How could others get an award and/or recognition for simply using a business solution as intended?)
- This is a plus on the employees’ record for their annual performance review when it comes time for a bonus and/or raise. It shows that person uses company resources to benefit their projects and the organization as a whole by saving time and money in the use, reuse and repurposing of assets from the DAM. This fact can be highlighted even more so if they regularly contribute new assets to the DAM.
- This may peak the interest of the rest of company who may not have heard of the DAM before. (What can the DAM do for them?)
- When you find the individuals who are most active users of the DAM, ask them:
- Why they use the DAM so much
- For any best practices they have been using to achieve their results
- What they would like to see improved. This could be valuable feedback for future improvements.
- To have them tell their story as a DAM user so everyone could learn from them on how and why they use the DAM. That has great value in encouraging even more user adoption or more departments getting on board with the idea of the DAM solution. Every organization with digital assets needs a DAM, but that DAM becomes even more valuable to everyone who uses it as soon as the organization shares assets across departments and throughout the organization.
How are you measuring the progress of your DAM?
Another DAM Blog 
April 14, 2009 at 3:14 PM
Great blog! I’d like to add Digital Rights Management to the list. Organizations that take Digital Rights seriously and utilize Digital Asset Management as a tool to help control and enforce DRM are in a better position to distribute their content safely, and are less likely to incur potential lawsuits.
When we work with publishing companies that commission a large amount of photo shoots, we always ask to see their photo contract forms. Many times these signed agreements have a lot of legal mumbo jumbo, but do not contain specifics on usage rights for the Web, for print, or for merchandize. Worse off, many publishers have to way to link the signed paper contract back to the actual digital photos or articles. A DAM system can easily help in this area, through the use of metadata and relationships. Wether the publisher chooses to assign a rights/contract ID number to assets or chooses to scan the article and relate it to the associated assets is an implementation point.
April 14, 2009 at 7:29 PM
I blogged about DAM and Right Management earlier.
Most DRM simply limits the access or use of an asset. DRM applied to assets is often easily broken by an end user. What I believe DRM should do (but rarely does) is track what assets were used, where they were and how they are to be used. This tracking aspect can be achieved not by using spyware like some vendors have tried in the past, but by ordering assets from the DAM and answering these where and how questions. This way assets can be re-used from the DAM (without causing redundancy of the same assets each time an asset is used) as long as the appropriate rights have been tracked and usage has been approved before even getting access to hi-res asset.
April 14, 2009 at 11:22 PM
Right, user based DRM is certainly easy to circumvent but tracking and understanding what rights you have to use stock photography or commissioned photography can be achieved much easier through Digital Asset Management. I think we agree on this 🙂 Cheers, and keep up the great posts!
March 8, 2011 at 8:48 PM
Thanks, Henrik, for some practical ways to measure DAM use. It’s really important to provide implement-able ways to measure use, instead of just talking about these things in the abstract. However, it seems that for the first list of bullet points, these are more about use than progress. I suppose when I see the term “progress,” I’m thinking about greater adoption, more sophisticated use, better metatagging. For example, one bullet point below says “How many assets are metatagged…?” but would it be more useful to ask not only how many are tagged, but how accurately these assets are tagged? Thanks for the great, practical ideas with respect to measuring usage.
March 13, 2011 at 11:07 PM
Thank you for your comment. Without use, there is no progress. Any solution not used is a shelf baby that simply collects dust. The idea is to measure the use and note what shows growth (progress) vs. what does not. If it does not show use (and improvements), there lies a challenge to make it better. You make an interesting point about “…how accurately these assets are tagged.” Of course, we can periodically poll users, “Did you find what you were searching for?” and try to capture the search quiry for further analysis. This accuracy in metadata is relatively based on what metadata values are available as well as searchable. If users can not regularly find what they are searching for (and those unsearchable assets actually exist within the DAM), there is likely room for improvement with the existing metadata as well as the process in creating metadata going forward. This topic is likely worth a blog post in itself.
February 5, 2012 at 12:59 PM
Here is the audio podcast version of How can I measure DAM progress?
February 7, 2012 at 1:09 PM
Hi Henrik,
Coming late to this great discussion, although it is still timely despite your having written this blog 3 years ago.
I agree wholeheartedly that one characteristic feature of an ‘enterprise’ DAM is a built-in reporting tool, or a ready-made integration with some reporting software. However, for organizations that can’t afford to purchase a high end asset management repository that includes reporting, there are still options out there for creating the reports using a variety of commercial solutions. In this case, you need to have a good understanding of the DAM’s data model, which would require some training (or poking around).
Data analysis can be misleading unless the company has a clear sense of what key performance indicators they need to track. For instance, number of downloads might be misleading because there may be ‘failed’ downloads that require multiple retries.
One interesting and quite doable way to track usage is based on messages sent back to the DAM from the ‘publishing’ tool. So for instance, if you’ve integrated your DAM with your CMS, then whenever a user has made a call and placed an asset on a page for the site, that data can be tracked on utilization. Likewise, if some user places an asset on an InDesign page, some DAM systems will actually allow you to track usage on-page.
A really basic KPI for measuring the success of a DAM system is user-generated database calls. I say user-generated, because some DAM systems are chatty on the back end. So you rightly assess that the more people using the system and the more requests they make are definitely good indicators for option, although not necessarily conclusive evidence that things are going well.
this should be a session at one of the DAM conferences this year – or perhaps we should just create some webinar ’roundtable’ and invite a few other people to bounce this around a bit.