If you use a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution within your organization, do you use reports generated by the DAM directly?
Tag Archives: reDAM
Why do I need reports from a DAM?
If you select a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution meant for an organization (rather than a DAM meant for an individual), you should be able to generate reports directly from the DAM.
Why do you need reports from a DAM solution?
Well, let’s see…
How do you measure the progress of your DAM? (How do you spell ROI?)
How often are specific assets used? What are the least used or most used assets in the DAM?
How do you evaluate the quality of all metadata in the DAM?
If you have a ordering system with your DAM, how do you review the orders in bulk?
How many users are actively registered with the DAM?
How many users are actually using the DAM?
Who are the most active users of the DAM?
All these questions can be answered by generating reports from a DAM. Often, the reports are generated by administrator. DAM generated reports hold a wealth of information that can be filtered and sorted to answer plenty of questions as to the progress of the DAM solution within your organization.
What reports can your DAM provide?
How do you use reports from your DAM?
Do you have someone inside your organization managing your DAM?
Continuing on my previous post, I thought it would be interesting to survey how many organizations have a digital asset manager or at least someone inside their organization managing the DAM.
Why do I need a Digital Asset Manager?
At a recent Digital Asset Management Conference, I was asked to present on the role of the Digital Asset Manager (what I do on a daily basis). This is not because I need to justify my position in this economy nor explain what I do aside from drink coffee all day, but rather to explain what it takes to:
- Listen, learn and adapt to changes in the business needs of the organization
- Promote, train and support all DAM users on a daily basis
- Explain how we measure ROI with every project, collection and asset we add to the DAM
- Simplify and unify across departments by sharing assets in DAM
- Network and interview potential users of DAM to see what their business needs are (which are usually similar to everyone else’s needs in the organization)
- Report on the progress of the DAM on weekly and monthly basis
- Create workflow for the use of assets with DAM
- Create and maintain up-to-date DAM documentation
- Maintain consistency
- Maintain metadata standards used within the organization
- Review and test any configurations and/or customizations for the DAM
- Be the biggest proponent, in-house advocate and expert in DAM for your organization
- Make sure a DAM solution does not become another ‘shelf baby’ (i.e. another tool which an organization invested in, but did not get user adoption, so it is another waste of time/money because no one uses it)
- Maintain an active registry of DAM users and needed permissions
This is one position that is in demand nowadays, but can be quite technical and requires:
- Patience (lots of it)
- Energy (lots of it)
- Attention to detail
- Process-orientation in order to create workflow that make sense to users
- Love of data (metadata)
- Consistency and flexibility (being methodical helps too)
- Thriving on progress (even baby steps)
- Customer service (i.e. user support)
- Ability to demonstrate how to improve production with DAM to save time and money, when used properly
- Prior DAM experience
In a previous post, we covered why you might need a DAM. So, your organization gets a DAM solution, it gets implemented for your organization and it is ready for regular operations. Now what?
- Who is driving the progress of DAM?
- Who is tracking progress, measuring growth and addressing risks to report on a weekly/monthly basis for stakeholders?
- Who will answer DAM questions and support DAM users?
- What happens when something goes wrong?
- Who is in charge of the DAM?
- Who will fix it?
- Who will be the adviser when to file a trouble ticket with the vendor versus what can be resolved in-house?
- Who will create the trouble ticket when the time comes?
- Who will follow up?
- Who will train users and power users of the DAM? (Attrition happens)
- Shall I go on?
Do you have a Digital Asset Manager?
Let us know when you are ready for consulting or assistance in finding Digital Asset Management professionals for your business.
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