september 28, 2018
“The secret to change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but building the new.” – Socrates
As a lead business analyst, I’ve worked on countless DAM implementations and in my experience, I have found most organizations have not been properly prepared for the change. This is the most overlooked aspect of a successful DAM implementation, proactively building a process in which people and technology work together in perfect harmony. The absence of this step immediately sets the project up for failure and limits adoption before it has the opportunity to launch.
How do you evaluate if you’re ready for a DAM and prepare your organization for the change?
The first step is to understand how your organization is currently functioning.
We all know, no matter how great the tool, users in your organization must be willing to adopt it to make it successful. The key to user acceptance is giving the right first impression. The best way to do this is to understand how the users are interacting with the current process and identify areas for simplification and automation in their current workload. Consider the following:
- How are users currently managing assets: from collection, storage, and management to distribution? What are their pain points?
- Who in your organization will be the users that interact with the DAM? What will be those interactions (add, downloading, managing, etc)?
- Will some users have special access or restrictions? Do they currently?
- What is the current list of metadata being captured, stored and associated with your assets? How do they search for current assets?
- What type of asset approval process exists offline today?
- How long do you retain your assets? Is there an achieve or expiration process?
- What types of reports or information do you need generated frequently? How are they generated today?
It’s clear that no two organizations, processes or technology setups will be the same but these questions should help you start uncovering where you are today.
Keep the DAM setup simple
Another important factor for user acceptance understands the tool is only as powerful as the setup, which should be SIMPLE! Consider all of your most used tools and they probably have one thing in common, they are easy to use.
From my experience, I’ve found most clients want to highly customize the tool to fit their current process instead of creating new and more efficient processes that truly leverage the tools capabilities. This will lead to more cumbersome processes in the long haul, beware!
To avoid this common trap, get a detailed demo of your chosen tool and prepare a mission statement of the intended purpose of this tool. Quite often, tools turn into the organization’s fix it all answer and are used for everything and not the original purpose, don’t let this happen to you.
Build your DAM roadmap
Once you have the current state captured and a mission statement for your DAM you are ready to start identifying the desired business goals in order of importance and build your DAM roadmap. Building a roadmap allows organizations to see the long-term growth of the tool while breaking it into achievable phases that deliver production ready functionality to end users and start the adoption of the tool immediately with the right foundation.
With these steps, you will be ready to take on your DAM implementation!