Your DAM Needs Governance
If you have a DAM, you need a governance strategy.
Governance is your written strategy of processes, people, and rules that guides how you operate and maintain your DAM program. It ensures that you meet goals, spend budget wisely, drive efficiency, and ultimately deliver a content system that meets your organization’s needs.
Without one, you’re bound to wake up to a DAM that’s difficult to manage, has unhappy users, and makes you spend more money than you should. Most importantly, you will not be in a position to address any challenges with adoption, content, data, and others that inevitably come up.
A DAM without governance
A client I supported experienced many symptoms of a lack of governance. To start, they had two parallel DAM systems with similar use cases. System management, content curation and metadata management efforts were duplicated across both systems, but wasn’t a responsibility assigned to anyone. Hundreds to thousands of assets were uploaded each week to both systems, delivered in several different ways. Stakeholders were often confused because no part of the DAM experience was consistent. Messy metadata meant that uploaders brought content in with minimal metadata with plans to fix later. Later never came, leaving many assets in both systems difficult to find by the following week. Because budget owners weren’t deeply connected with any DAM stakeholders, both systems were tied up in expensive, multi-year contracts.
These problems continued to snowball, until we addressed them in a comprehensive overhaul of their DAM program. This transformation included a series of recommendations to stand up an effective governance practice that met the organization where they were at, with a series of common sense strategies to encourage cross functional collaboration and decision-making. Governance will be essential to ensuring their previous mistakes don’t occur again.
No company sets out to build and ship such a painful experience. Working within any global organization is inherently complicated with tons of competing priorities, making it easy to take your eyes off how your DAM is operating day to day. Projects can fall through, responsibilities often shift, and a lot of procedure can swing sideways following a reduction in force. It happens, and your to-do list continues to build up. The new normal never favors good, strong process unless it is intentional.
Governance is your first and best line of defense to protect your DAM system, its content, and its people from all of these shifts.
There is a better way, and it starts with bringing the right people together.
This is part of a series of articles on digital asset management governance. Stay tuned for more entries where we dive deeper into how it can rescue troubled DAM programs, discuss examples of governance in action, and share other best practices.
If you’re ready to start optimizing your DAM system, now is the perfect time to contact us!