Rebecca Allen's blog

Our second session of the Digital Asset Management (DAM) Jumpstart series will address creative workflows and marketing resource management. The following post from speaker Ralph Windsor of Daydream describes the problems organizations face without effective metadata strategies in place to manage marketing communications:

After a decision has been made to invest into DAM or MRM solutions and the system has been introduced, one of the realisations that many marketers run into is that old IS maxim, “Garbage In Garbage Out”.

First, staff begin amassing marcomms collateral with the intention of uploading it. Then there is the next job to consider: who will carry out the cataloguing work so we can all find it? At this point, enthusiasm amongst most creative and marketing personnel begins to wane and so also their motivation to complete the cataloguing work effectively.

To get through the ever growing mountain of collateral produced by the business, metadata entry and management tasks may be passed down to inexperienced juniors or carried out at high speed to ensure that assets are available on the system - where everyone just assumes their colleagues will be able to find them because they are 'on the system'.

With the benefit of hindsight though many DAM projects, and even more business cases, the most profound lesson I’ve learned is akin to ‘money can’t buy you love’. The business case must be more than just a tool to fund your project. There’s both the ROI aspect and strategic rationale.

The gains firms realize from DAM derive from fundamental changes to business processes, in an environment of complex, highly variable workflows. While DAM systems enable these improved processes, the organizational support required to make these transitions is the crucial factor in how quickly the gains from DAM are realized. Yep, we have to figure out exactly how those users should use the system, then make sure they do it.

The presentation of the business case if often the best opportunity to secure this level of support from the right people. Teams often narrowly focus on ROI achieved through cost savings, to narrowly focus on securing funding for the DAM system implementation. The big gains, and typically what’s really behind a firm’s interest in DAM, are strategic and eventually drive increased revenues. Cogent, visually-depicted business cases often become the master from which project “marketing” is derived – whether securing funding for system implementation projects, fostering executive sponsorship support or marshalling the numerous resources that make the transition to new, improved business processes actually come true.

Digital assets come in a seemingly limitless variety of flavors. Some intrinsic metadata comes along for the ride with particular formats, but without a robust metadata system and workflow in place, many assets will be “left behind” in any digital asset management (DAM) system. Use a systematic approach to naming: reduce the burden on users who need to open assets to determine contents, get those assets appearing in search results, and prevent misplaced files and data extinction down the road.

Ever since Polish biologist Jastrzębowski coined the term "ergonomics" in 1857, we have been trying to decipher the tricky relationship between machine and human. Regardless of whether you're designing front-end interface functionality or crafting an information architecture that serves as the clothes hanger for your content, user-centered design is undeniably a major player in achieving results. It’s certainly a crucial consideration in every taxonomy project. Project stakeholders often envision the ideal taxonomy as being "all things to all people". It's a wonderful idea in theory, but the resulting structure would be a chaotic mishmash that in practice fails to meet most user needs. Part of the solution is in the art—and science—of understanding and categorizing your audience.

I was recently in a meeting where it was said that a lack of subject matter expertise is a disadvantage in taxonomy development. This is understandable; it makes sense to assume that the more domain expertise a taxonomist has, the better the final information product will be. However, my experience has shown that this is not always the case. So exactly how does the role of subject matter expert (SME) fit into taxonomy development?