DAM Survival Guide: Digital Asset Management Initiative Planning

I was turned onto this book by a friend as a good resource when planning a digital transformation effort. The thing is for all our wiz-bang connected cloud systems, there are still millions of documents floating around. All of the PDF, XLS, DOC, PNG files that clogging up our drives and cloud drives need a home and that is where DAM comes in. You are doing DAM right now, how do you organize all your files? Got lots of folders and subfolders on your desktop? (we all do). Well, that folder structure is defined by your brain and what you think is logical. For you, it is. You can (for the most part) find the files you need. When it comes to enterprises somehow everyone's logical structure has to come together. That is a mess and that is where DAM comes in to help understand, then define the structure.

Some of my notes from the book include

You cannot overestimate the power and influence human psychology will have over your success. (So much so, in fact, I’ve devoted an entire section of this book to it.) If your initiative is hindered or derailed because your users end up disliking the system you provide, recovery will be extremely difficult. It’s not easy to switch DAM software once you’re locked in by contract or workflow investment.

No other aspect of your initiative is more important than user satisfaction. The best route to user satisfaction comes from understanding users, and the best route to understanding users comes from interviewing users. The sooner you conduct your user interviews the better. Virtually every decision you make for your initiative will be influenced by the needs of users, so if you delay this important step, you might find yourself heading down some bad paths.

DAM is all about organization. People can’t use what they can’t find. Improperly tagged assets are as good as invisible,

Here is the Link to the Amazon Book