Jessica Berlin
With a love for organization, Berlin works to create a library of rich content for the American Cancer Society.
What companies/organizations have you worked for as a DAM professional? What was your role at each?
I work for the American Cancer Society where I am the Director of Digital Asset Management.
How did you learn DAM? Any recommended sources?
I love organization! In my life before DAM, I always looked to find ways to organize design file that made more sense and helped my staff locate them faster. Once I was introduced to the world of DAM, I threw myself into a mix of free webinars, internet research, blogs, and DAM conferences. Seeing what other companies/organizations were doing really helped put all the pieces together.
As far as specific resources go, I started out by reading the DAM survival guide and listening to the free webinars on Picturepark’s site. I also follow a lot of the DAM leaders on Twitter and LinkedIn where they post some great links to articles.
What’s the most important thing for someone new to DAM to understand about DAM?
You do not need to be a techie to understand or work in DAM. You do need to have a penchant for organization and process, though.
If you weren’t doing DAM as a career, what would you be doing?
Before I was in DAM, I was in creative services and graphic design, so I would probably still be doing that. However, in a dream world, I would be teaching photography.
What is your ongoing greatest challenge with DAM?
Dealing with all the different cooks you need in the kitchen. I have found that my role is more of a facilitator. Working to get the right people in one room to figure something out or develop a process. There is also a lot of selling and defending DAM to various groups.
What was your biggest success with regard to DAM?
I was able to hire some amazing staff. It was a wonderful opportunity to be able to build my own team. We have been working on developing and implementing a brand new tool that is heads and shoulders above the previous one.
I also think it was invaluable to take the time in the beginning to figure out what success would look like and then determine how we would get there. We also made sure to have a core team that crossed over departments so we could get insight from all angles. We tried to do it right from the start. Although we don’t have a crystal ball to see if all that preplanning will lead to success, I’m confident we’ve done everything we could with the resources we have, so for me that is a success.
What more would you like to learn about DAM?
Not DAM specifically, but I’d like to learn more about where digital technology is headed in general. I think we get so focused on our day-to-day roles and forget to look around for things that may not be obviously related to DAM that we could utilize.
This interview originally appeared on DAM Guru on Mon, 03 Mar 2014. For more DAM News interviews, see the interviews index page.
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