Digital Asset Management: An Overview For IT Managers

Rick Cook writing on the HP sponsored Input/Output blog does a good job of explaining the basics of DAM from the perspective of IT managers.  The article, titled, It’s In Here SOMEplace: Digital Asset Management For IT is at an introductory level, so it does gloss over a certain amount of more in-depth detail, however, it covers the hosting choices, workflow, metadata and also the vitally important change management element of DAM that is often acknowledged, but rarely addressed:

“Aside from putting thought and effort into designing your DAM database, there is another consideration here and that is the users’ response. Like Customer Resource Management (CRM) software, Digital Asset Management software is only useful if it is used, and used in the right way.  This means that a successful DAM system requires educating the users on its benefits, training them on how to use the system, and then keeping after them to make sure they actually use it. This is complicated because like CRM, the benefits (finding the images) don’t show up until after the effort (entering the metadata) has been put into doing it. It usually requires an ongoing campaign of gentle nudging to remind users to actually enter images and data into the system.” [Read More]

If you are an IT manager then Rick’s article is a great primer on what you should expect to need to consider.  I would hesitate to recommend that you can get away with reading it 10 minutes before a DAM vendor is due to call into your offices to deliver a sales pitch and still look knowledgeable about DAM in front of your colleagues, however, it should certainly be on your reading list and may save some time with Google.  It’s certainly considerably more useful than the Wikipedia entries about Digital Asset Management.

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