Seeing the Forest – Keys to DAM Sustainability
LogicSource Director and DAM expert Carol Thomas-Knipes has kindly provided us with the supporting material for her recent presentation at last week’s Insight Exchange Network (IEN) DAM Practitioners’ Summit that took place in New York.
Concerned with long-term sustainability, her advice should be valuable to anyone tasked with securing the future relevance, usability and growth of their organisation’s DAM initiative. Carol’s key ‘mantras’ identify a number of key areas:
- What problems are we trying to solve?
- Where else can the DAM add value?
- Don’t get lost in the weeds
- Deploy small to succeed, think big to survive
- How will you illustrate ongoing value of the DAM system?
- Support Champions and maintain governance
- Know the “What’s in it for me” answers for each group of users
Taking a birds-eye view of the DAM industry, Carol acknowledges that DAM professionals (although being fully aware that the “devil is in the details”) are also in a unique position to take a step back from the features, functions and problem-solving in order to see the forest for the trees and gauge the DAM landscape as a whole. In terms of keeping abreast of DAM solutions and their effectiveness, Carol recommends a number of key activities, including checking in with users to ensure that the solution is actually solving problems, redefining success as it invariably changes, investigating bad ‘buzz’, and supporting those that are championing the use of DAM within your organisation.
I was at the conference to watch Carol’s presentation (along with all the others) and although the PowerPoint deck alone doesn’t convey Carol’s very clear and concise presenting style, the points should still be very useful for those who missed the live performance and are looking for some solid, actionable advice from a DAM professional with decades of real experience in DAM.
The presentation is available as a free PDF download from our DAM Whitepapers service here: https://damwhitepapers.org/whitepapers/27-seeing-the-forest-keys-to-dam-sustainability
As well as a forthcoming write-up of the IEN DAM event for both DAM News and DAM Guru, we are hoping to publish a few more presentations from speakers at IEN (subject to their approval). For those who did not attend, based on what I saw, this has to be possibly the most underrated conference in the DAM events calendar currently. The quality of the information offered by both speakers and panelists was of an exceptionally high standard. What IEN lacks in scale it more than made up for in terms of insight and expertise, with none of the excessive commercialisation that can sometimes characterise events of this nature.
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