Overwhelmed with your project? Start with an asset inventory

A reader recently asked: "My company has not had a digital asset management system.  We are overwhelmed with the thought of a transition to such a system.  We have assets on file servers throughout the organization, our agencies have many of our assets, as do our printers.  How do we begin a plan for corralling our assets and building an organizational structure for them?"

It's easy to be overwhelmed by the magnitude of a project at the start when things look so fragmented and chaotic.  How to get started?  Begin by surveying your content.  Where is it, what kind of shape is it in, who owns it, is it up to date, does it contain metadata, is it redundant?

Think about getting rid of the 'ROT' - Redundant, Out-of-date and Trivial content.  The inventory process will quickly point to major problems and pain points and help guide your initial efforts. First on the agenda - clean things up.  Delete.  Purge. Get rid of the 'ROT'.  Then consider the context of your business problems and opportunities:  Where are the quick hits?  What are the highest value assets?  What processes are most time intensive or require fast turnaround?  Where are the bottlenecks? 

The idea is not to solve all the problems of the organization or create a galactic repository to serve all audiences and all processes but to decide on a manageable chunk of work that can provide a relatively quick pay off.  You can begin a process of prioritization by examining each content source and deciding if it makes sense to tackle - is there a driving business need to migrate content to a DAM?  Who will benefit?  Will the cost to the organization (not just technology and migration but disruption due to requirements gathering, engagement of subject matter experts, implementation of metadata tagging processes, etc) be worth the outcome?

You can determine this by evaluating each area based on the number of processes impacted, relative value of the assets, size of repositories, magnitude of impact of on processes, complexity of migration, state of metadata, identification of ownership, level of risk, even relative visibility of the project.  Evaluating these on a low-medium-high scale, with a numerical value assigned to each element of the scale will allow you to score the project and decide on a weighted ranking as a go/no-go decision point.

For example, a repository that supports the field sales organization, marketing collateral design and print publishing of support materials that serves a large vocal audience might outrank a repository containing of training videos for internal staff.  However, the former project might entail so much risk that it is better to begin with the lower value project with the smaller audience - the low profile, low risk project.  This way, mistakes won't be so widely visible and the team can learn about technology capabilities, development of standards, configuration of tools, migration issues, etc.

Consider what is important to your project and rank those factors accordingly.  If low risk was an important issue, then a high impact project might receive a lower score than a low impact project, etc.

DAM projects can be daunting, but start with a thoughtful evaluation of processes and pains and take a detailed look at the content and its condition and location and then decide where to focus your energy and resources.

Seth Earley,
President, Earley & Associates, Inc
seth@earley.com
www.earley.com
781-820-8080