Kim Phillips

Kim knows that the rollout of a digital asset management system can make or break it with the end users. She offers some great tips with regard to introducing a new DAM system company wide.

What companies/organizations have you worked for as a DAM professional? What was your role at each?

I started learning about the Digital Asset Management industry in 2007/08 while working for my current employer Bass Pro Shops. In 2010 we started using a DAM service and I was involved heavily in the setup of the system from an end user perspective.

At present I’m the Image Asset Coordinator in charge of asset ingestion, taxonomy, training, troubleshooting, and general administration of the database for about 150 users, and the font librarian for the Creative department.

How do you describe digital asset management to others?

I explain the bare bones of what I do, which is essentially an image librarian for the thousands of assets we have on file. In that scenario DAM is about sorting and filing those assets in a database so the entire company can easily access them, instead of by a single librarian.

How did you learn DAM? Any recommended sources?

My learning experience was all by touch, which I’ve found is the case for many people in the industry. We had stock photography cd’s sitting in a back room of the photography department that needed to be accessed by the creative department. I was a project traffic person and moved over to organize the assets and started the process of adding metadata to files and moving them to a server for the creative staff. That eventually morphed into the DAM library we have online now.

I actually had two premedia vendors talk to me at length about DAM. One of the vendors was very much ahead of the curve in terms of where DAM was going and I learned a lot from them. They pointed me towards Real Story Group and we were able to purchase the Real Story Group DAM Vendor Evaluation report. That was the best resource I encountered that went straight to the heart of DAM systems that would best meet our needs as a company. I also read articles on CMSWire. My other favorite resource is other Asset managers via LinkedIn groups or networking at DAM functions.

What’s the most important thing for someone new to DAM to understand about DAM?

DAM requires a lot of groundwork before rollout. I’ve heard stories of partial DAM rollouts that soured the end users on the whole system before it even got off the ground. So here are some tips that helped me:

• Understand the nature of your company’s assets and who the end users are. When I started out the thought was the assets were just for the creative group. As I started talking with people in various departments I realized more people needed access for a variety of reasons (video stills, press releases, web banners, and print pieces).

• Get feedback from people across several departments on how they would search for an asset. We found that some groups search by sku (typically merchants) some are more comfortable with keywords and a few just want to browse folders to see what’s out there.

• Have a good roadmap for implementing the DAM. Most DAM vendors will work with you on this. I’m always cautious if a vendor says at the outset “we can customize that for you”. That usually ends up being costlier in the long run.

• Don’t be afraid to ask questions. There are no stupid questions in this business. Also, ask to speak to other users before you make a final decision. A few times I discovered that clients bought a very robust system they were barely using because it didn’t play well with their other databases but they’d already written the check.

What was your biggest success with regard to DAM?

Prior to the implementation of the DAM tool most of my time was spent finding and delivering assets to various people throughout the company. Instead of focusing on newer assets and getting them in to the database in a timely manner, I was a courier. Seeing the DAM tool rolled out to the company drastically changed my workload and allowed me to focus more on the user experience and ingesting new assets into the database.

This interview originally appeared on DAM Guru on Tue, 06 Oct 2015. For more DAM News interviews, see the interviews index page.

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