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Is the journal dead?


Over the last few months of 2010,  several sources have mentioned and even confirmed that a particular periodical about Digital Asset Management (DAM) has ceased publication. Some deny this in disbelief. Some believe it will be reincarnated like a phoenix out of the ashes. or not.

Many DAM Professionals have generously contributed (for free) written content on their knowledge about DAM which this periodical published over the past several years. The same periodical was made available at over US$700 (the undiscounted US price) for 6 issues per annual subscription. Sounds like a deal for someone aside from the readers and the writers.

While charging over US$1 per page, I can not imagine why this journal would cease its publication in today’s digital market. After all, readers…oh wait. Never mind.

Anyhow, DAM Professionals have been able to share their own knowledge at their own great expense and then have prior articles available online at a fee per article. Hopefully, these articles will continue to be available online but the stone tablet… I mean paper edition may cease to exist.

Some say the journal will take the form (like a phoenix) of an e-zine in 2011 and likely be called something else. And…is it still the same thing then? This e-zine may be offered for a faction of what the journal cost. Imagine that. They may have found the last nails for that coffin to bury that idea.

How else will we read or even write about Digital Asset Management aside from books?

Let us think for a nanosecond. What are you reading right now? A blog.

Blogs don’t matter. No one reads blogs anymore. Blogs are dead. Explain why this blog has more unique readers than any periodical about Digital Asset Management ever had as well as many of the other dedicated blogs about DAM. Shall we continue ignoring the impact of the monthly or sometimes even daily information shared by this medium (blogging) on the field of the Digital Asset Management? What other medium does this today?

In full disclosure, I was interviewed by this particular periodical. It took one year to get published. Not 6 months as they said it would. They “forgot” to while I reminded them every few months. This might be considered fast…if the standards were set by cave men carving stone.

If you didn’t pay for it, remember it can’t be any good. One of their editors asked me if I could ‘wrap up’ some of my blog posts into an article for the periodical. I checked to make sure if I understood them correctly. They wanted me to take my blog posts (which I write and share free of charge), spend my time writing their article for their journal (uncompensated), they would publish it (I would remain still uncompensated) and they sell free content back to you as a subscriber of this journal. So they profit from the work and knowledge of others who provide this for free. Who in their right mind still does this in today’s digital age? Here is an idea: If it’s free, it stays free. If it costs, all should be compensated for creating the end result.

Blogs don’t have a good reputation. Reputation comes from the creator of content and/or the value of content itself. Reputation does not come from the channel (such as a blog) which simply a vehicle for the message (whether it is fact or opinion) nor what the channel (such as a journal) charges for its content. In case you need to be published for the sake of your work, explore more cost effective ways than custom publishing and trade journals. You can do it yourself for free nowadays and you can market it more widely and better (using social media) than those you have paid to deliver and market your content today. Who buys content based on who published it rather than the value of the content itself or the writer’s reputation? Content still rules.

After heavily filtering my response, I reminded the editors they were still sitting on the interview they did with me and I declined their offer to ‘wrap up’ any of my free blog posts for them to profit from or re-publish.

If you blog, you don’t have to wait for anyone to publish. You can leave the greedy, the pathetically slow and the technically un-inclined to fail without your content and knowledge.

I am not bitter.  Just continue paying lots of money to get free content that was regurgitated into another form. It is your money.

Both readers and writers deserve better.

Is the journal dead? I have more nails and a shovel if someone needs them.


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Why should I pay for the DAM when the entire organization uses it?


Someone asked me about this question and remembered I wrote about this briefly in an earlier blog post, but wanted me to ellaborate. So here is blog post to explain it.

Let us say one group or department is the original requester of a DAM solution within an organization. Likely this same department becomes the business owner, stakeholder and/or sponsor of the DAM solution. This same department or group pays to administer and maintain the DAM. They might pay for any monthly/quarterly/annual licensing fees and/or service level agreements (SLA) for the DAM solution as well. Now let us say other departments see the value in using the DAM to keep the organization’s branding, graphics, photographs, publications, presentations, reports, video or other intellectual property (IP). The DAM gets more user adoption by more departments. Now who pays for the DAM within this organization?

Often, what occurs is the original requester, sponsor or stakeholder continues paying for the DAM solution. Because of this, they might say “Wait, I am paying out of my department’s budget for other departments to benefit from this solution as well? What’s in for me? Why should I pay for the DAM when the entire organization uses it?”

Consider this idea “Why am I the only one paying for it? If we share the DAM, share the cost.”

Enter the idea of chargeback or simply charging the department who requests to acquire/create/use something with the actual expense in resources used by refunding it. This idea is likely a change for many companies in how they deal with budgets and how departments are accountable for the resources they use. This also keeps a department which may overtax another department’s resources in check. So, with this idea every department or group has their own budget as usual, but since every DAM user should have a unique login (right?) and possible different collections of assets they can access or share, why not split the total cost of these expenses based on actual usage of the DAM solution per department? Charge each department based on usage of the DAM solution.

If one department uses the DAM more than another department by a measurable amount or percentage, should they pay a larger share of the cost each month/quarter/year? Should each department be able to share this cost evenly or should each department pay for what they use based on a percentage? Or have one department pay for it all?

How do you measure usage of the DAM? With usage reports from the DAM which could list:

  • Who are the DAM users (by individual login) accessed the DAM? (keeping individual user accountability)
  • Who has the most active DAM users within a given period of time?
  • Who wants/needs/asks for the most time in administration, maintenance, support and/or training?
  • When did they access the DAM? (keeping time accountability)
  • How often did those users or group of users access the DAM? (time based usage)
  • How long did they access the DAM over a period of time? (number of minutes or hours)
  • How much was downloaded/exported from the DAM? (by the number of assets and/or file size if bandwidth is measured)
  • How much was uploaded/imported to the DAM? (by the number of assets and/or if bandwidth is measured)

I would recommend looking what you are paying for internally and externally to gauge what are the costs of doing business.

Some DAM vendors charge for bandwidth (how many GB is uploaded/downloaded to/from DAM within a given period). Some don’t.

Server space costs money regardless of whether it under your own IT department’s domain, a vendor’s domain or in the cloud. Who is using the storage space?

Is the data deduplicated? Do you want to dedupe the DAM data to minimize duplicate assets?

Some DAM vendors charge per DAM login or per concurrent user. Some DAM systems limit how many users you can have or the total users at one time. Can your organization add/remove DAM users without the vendor’s help?

How much does it cost to administer, support, maintain a DAM and train the DAM users? How much does it cost in errors and problems when you don’t?

Why should I pay for the DAM when the entire organization uses it?

Are these costs of doing business worth sharing as you share business tools such as a DAM solution?


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Is there another weekly podcast about Digital Asset Management?


Another DAM podcast is a weekly series of audio recordings which complement Another DAM blog. In September 2010, these podcasts began to appear with weekly interviews of different DAM professionals from around the world. Everyone interviewed have different stories to tell, information to share and is passionate about what they do. Some people interviewed are well-known in the practice of Digital Asset Management or related fields.

Every person interviewed is asked at least three similar questions:

  1. How are they involved with Digital Asset Management
  2. A question related to what they do
  3. What advise would they give DAM Professionals or people aspiring to become DAM professionals

You can listen and even subscribe to this podcast series:

This weekly podcast series is hosted by Henrik de Gyor, the author of Another DAM blog.

Another DAM podcast weekly interviews will continue into 2011. Who would you like to hear interviewed?

Is there another weekly podcast about Digital Asset Management?


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How do I create use cases for DAM?

A blog reader asked about how to create use cases for DAM.  I gave a presentation about this topic during a DAM conference.

What use cases did you have before DAM was part of the equation? Before you had a DAM, were your workflows documented?

All too often, use cases are not documented. In fact, they may be locked in multiple silos where each person (even within the same group ) do things differently.  Therefore, migrating to a workflow with DAM becomes a mystery. Without use cases, the user adoption of the DAM is often lower if users do not know why nor how nor when to use the DAM.   Where does DAM fit in the users’ daily workflow? Use cases can also affect the choice of a DAM solution.

Use cases need to be documented and shared.

Another reason for having use cases is training for new people. How do newly hired people find out how to do their job? Are they born with this knowledge? Should an employer expect everyone to know how to use all the tools and policies of the organization to get their job done?  Not likely.

Enter a new person (new hire) to the organization. What are they supposed to do? What tools are involved? When do they use the DAM and for what purposes?  Should new people operate differently than people doing the same tasks for years within the same organization? Not likely, but they often do. Does each person who coaches a new person give their own version of how to do things (plus or minus a few steps)? Is this standardized? This is often not only due to a particular level of experience, but lack of documentation and poor training. And we expect consistency. Somehow. Maybe by mind reading? That is not likely going to happen.

When you start researching a DAM for your organization, instead of looking at shiny features, see if it would work well with your use cases by presenting them to the vendor during a demo. Have real assets you would likely be working with along with real use cases. Ask the vendor to demo their solution for your use cases with your assets with metadata from start to finish in front of you.

Start building use cases with what you have and how you do things today.

  • What do you do today?
  • How do you do it?
  • Who does what?
  • When does it happen?
  • Why is it done that way?
  • What is the process?
  • What tools are used?
  • How could this improve?
  • How can this be done more consistently?

Be sure to consider the people, process and technology (in that order) which are involved from start to finish. Not sure who/how/what is involved? Ask by using…

  • Surveys
    • Online or paper form, with long answer questions, not simply ratings
    • All roles (don’t expect 100% return, even with a prize)
    • Send to everyone including decision makers and potential DAM users doing the daily work
  • Group workshops
    • Be aware of who is talking and who is not
    • Include all group members
    • In case extroverts have all the say while introverts remain quiet in the corner getting frustrated, have people take turns talking so everyone contributes
  • Individual interviews of:
    • Not just senior staff, but junior staff for a varying perspective
    • Both computer literate and those who prefer analog
    • All roles

When reviewing who is working, consider their role in the organization, not just their name so you can build and scale these job functions as needed.

Who makes the initial request? Who/What takes the request? Who handles/processes the request? Where does the request go after that? and after that? and after that? (note a pattern to fill the gaps)

How many other people do the same task(s)? Is this redundancy to handle volume or act as a backup? Can this scale up or down today based on the amount of work to do?

What is the volume of requests? Where do the requests get filled/completed? Who does this? Who/What delivers the end product/service?

Consider the whole life cycle of typical project from idea to delivery. And walk through all the steps.

How much communication is involved in all this? Likely not enough.  It is not enough to lock decision makers in a room. As discussed earlier, there are different points of view to keep in mind.

Keep the communication channels open among all differing points of view.

Stay positive. When negative points need focusing, laugh about it, then find a resolution.

Create roles. Envision the end result. Have a goal. Make it clear. Try even mind mapping. Simplify when in doubt. Follow through. Measure the results.

Avoid jargon and acronyms (so anyone can understand it). Be open to feedback, but have a schedule with deadlines and accountability.

However you create use cases, write them down and share it within your organization.

Let us know when you are ready for vendor neutral consulting on Digital Asset Management. We can also help you create your use cases.

How do you create use cases for DAM?