Feedback from the IEN 2019 DAM Practitioner’s Summit (Part 2)

By in DAM Guru Blog Archive

This article is the second instalment of feedback about the recent IEN DAM Practitioner’s Summit from delegates who attended.  The first can be read here.  The responses featured in this article are as follows:

What were the most useful insights you gained from the IEN conference?

Jennifer Anna

A consistent thread at the conference revolved around challenges pertaining to stakeholder buy-in, support and user adoption. A lack of organization support and measurable change behavior results in a certain level of professional stagnation. The fate of the digital asset manager is the most interesting subject to me. Organizational support and adoption of digital asset management platforms can resolve many of the issues pertaining to a happy and healthy DAM (and DAM practitioner), e.g. metadata capture, rights managements, vendor selection, and I was pleased to see it addressed at the IEN DAM Summit.

Henrik de Gyor

Great for gaining insight across a number of industries with other colleagues working with Digital Asset Management

Alexandra Lederman

I found the panel on Rights Management helped me understand when/where/why I would recommend investing in a Rights Management product. The presentation on empathetic metadata helped me understand why I removed “Diversity” from my organizations taxonomy. I also really enjoy taking “tours” of other organization’s DAM systems (I wish there were more). I found it interesting to see how DAMs are set up, implemented, and used through a visual tour.

What DAM-related subjects are currently the most interesting for you and was that reflected at IEN?

Margie Foster

I’m interested in how other large organizations customize their DAMs.  It is great to meet with other DAM professionals, especially those that use the same tool I do.  The topics at IEN were great conversation starters and helped me make several new connections.

Henrik de Gyor

Tagging & Empathy

Vendor Selection, Management, and DAM Essentials

Elevating the Role of DAM Professionals Within the Organization and Beyond

Mark DiNoia

Anything to do with metadata is most helpful and interesting. Also the implementation (and fear of) AI. These topics were addressed at IEN in great detail in several presentations.

Alexandra Lederman

I am currently very interested in integrations, APIs, organization theory, asset life cycle, and system models and I personally did not feel that was reflected fully at IEN.

Do you think the ROI from DAM is properly understood by users? If not, what would help to demonstrate its value?

Frank DeCarlo

I come from an advertising/marketing production background, so in many ways I believe I look at DAM a bit differently than others who use it for another solution set or who see it closer to as a ‘nice to have’. For me, it’s been a necessity and a way of streamlining workflows for over 20 years, thus engrained that a DAM system, at a minimum, finds, distributes and protects assets that have been created or obtained at a cost. So, when well-paid creatives who are not using a DAM and spending unnecessary time in the ‘search’ or not being able to find it at all, I see operations generating a loss.

Henrik de Gyor

No. Still needs more work to constantly explain what’s it for, who is it for, where the value is to those who don’t realize it yet and when should they use it.

Jennifer Anna

No.  Companies and organizations tend to be reactive not proactive and lean towards technology solutions with direct financial drivers.  ROI has always been elusive for DAM systems beyond the efficiency arguments. At one point in time, there was a belief DAM would reduce headcount but it’s the opposite, DAM requires a spectrum of professionals with different skill sets.  Without tracking asset usage, cost savings can also be a challenging ROI argument to make.

The DAM community currently understands the need to advocate for the platform, workflows and most importantly organizational change behavior. We’ve evolved from focusing primarily on technology and moved towards thinking about people. We need to continue advocating but frankly, DAM vendors need to do a better job at marketing.  A few years ago, David Diamond wrote an article titled, “Five Reasons Why DAM is NO Photoshop,” which discusses the issues around the failure of DAM to become a common place software similar to the omnipresent software applications Photoshop, Dropbox, and Google Drive. I believe his arguments continue to be true today. We live in a digital realm where companies are beginning to chase after new technologies at every turn. Ironically, the one marketing technology designed to support all the others has done a terrible job marketing itself. 

Mark DiNoia

I think it is understood by users, but it needs to be communicated to management. This doesn’t always translate to ROI in dollars. In my experience, ROI from DAM is directly connected to getting the creative team to focus on their work of being creative and not concerned about file organization, metadata, etc. This will ultimately make them more productive and capable of delivering a more creative product.

Alexandra Lederman

Unfortunately, I do not. I think an actual workshop, not a presentation, with facilitators demonstrating their ROI with their real numbers followed by small groups and individuals working on their own ROI, and ending with a share out (including results, obstacles, surprises/unknowns) within the small groups and the whole conference.

Has DAM really innovated in the last five years and if so, in what ways?

Henrik de Gyor

Yes. Going on to the Cloud (instead of being on-premise). Having many more integration points to be a more useful rich media hub (via API) to many more spokes. Additional cloud services are able to add automated auto-tagging, transcription and translation, however all of these still need human verification.

Alexandra Lederman

I think the UX of DAM has improved which has enhanced user adoption. Cloud storage is another recent innovation that mostly impacts access, but equally important, I believe we will start to see further innovations as APIs advance and as systems thinking and mental models become more popular in society and the workplace as a whole.

What topics would you like to see discussed in greater depth by the DAM community?

Henrik de Gyor

What would maximize value for DAM for its users?

You have an operational DAM. Now what? How to move the DAM needle

Good and bad reasons to switch DAM systems

Jennifer Anna

Professional development and organizational governance.

Mark DiNoia

I would love to hear more about DAM successes versus DAM failures. My experience with DAM (searching for vendors, demos, purchase and implementation) has been very positive and am surprised to hear when other organizations have negative experiences. I think a great panel that could discuss the details with highs and lows would be helpful to anyone who is in the search phase of their DAM journey.

Alexandra Lederman

I would like to see the DAM community discussing how white the profession is and how we can make it more diverse (both in race and gender). Further, how we can use DAM to break down the patriarchal white supremacy that exists in the organizations we work for.

How do you see DAM developing over the next few years based on both what you know from your own experience and what you learned at this event?

Henrik de Gyor

There will many more be issues to address, fix and improve, so no lack of work for us working in Digital Asset Management.

Alexandra Lederman

It seems like there’s a big push for AI to assist with metadata implementation, but I don’t foresee it actualizing as smoothly as the technologists envisage. I do believe it will be important for Digital Asset Managers to learn, understand, and implement natural language processing in order to make AI actually useful to taxonomies and ontologies.

What was your overall experience of IEN and would you go again?

Frank DeCarlo

My experience of the #IENDAM over the past two years has been excellent. The IEN team are true professionals in how they approach all aspects of their informative and thought-provoking networking seminars. Demonstrating a true understanding of where the DAM community has been and where many of us perceive it is going (insert chuckle) I will most certainly be attending future events and look forward to more engaging topics that force attendees to take a real hard look at where they are in their DAM ambit. One of the most valuable attributes I find is the way in which IEN creates a close and intimate interaction between both attendees and speakers with such diverse backgrounds.

Henrik de Gyor

Very satisfying to meet with so many people working in the field of Digital Asset Management. Yes, I would participate again.

Jennifer Anna

Very positive. I appreciated the practitioner heavy panels and audience. The conference felt like a “safe space” to have candid conversations around the challenges and successes involved in the very complicated and difficult work we do as DAM professionals.  I would definitely go again.

Mark DiNoia

This was a very positive experience for me and I would definitely attend again.

Alexandra Lederman

This is my overall experience:

We need more voices and perspectives presenting and participating on panels.

We need to own that the DAM profession is very white and male. And we need to explore why it’s like that and how we can diversify our profession.

I was very surprised by all of the microaggressions displayed at the conference and geared towards assertive women and people of color.

I would definitely attend again because I love hearing different perspectives on DAM and calling out sexist presentations.

 

If you also attended the IEN Practitioner’s Summit, we would be more than happy to hear from you and present your valuable feedback.  Thanks again to the following DAM Guru members who kindly participated in this, and the previous article:

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