So You Need Digital Asset Management?

With the increase in remote-first work culture, many companies find themselves surrounded with questions on how to optimize their workflow by ensuring their employees have access to the most up-to-date assets that are available to them. That’s where digital asset management (DAM) comes into the picture. I will explain how Phase2 uses DAM, and how your organization might choose, implement, or optimize your DAM solution. 

What is DAM? 

DAM stands for digital asset management and it’s a systematic way to organize your company's media assets such as images, videos, audio files, and documents via cloud-based technology. In addition, DAM typically includes a service for implementation and support.

At Phase2, we use DAM to not only house all of our media assets in one place to serve as a “source of truth”, we also use it to create structure, processes, and governance around these assets to ensure they are being used in the manner for which they are intended. Having a well-organized DAM solution takes the searching and guesswork out of asset usage so that employees can spend their valuable time creating their best work instead of endlessly searching for assets, coming up empty-handed, abandoning all hope, and leaving the DAM experience—never to return.  

To make sure employees have a positive DAM experience, there are a few best practices that make for a successful DAM solution. 

In general, a DAM solution should:    

1. Be a partner in creating workflows around DAM
2. Share insights and analytics to make decisions that will impact how the DAM solution is used
3. Control security and user permissions for governance
4. Have tools within the solution to streamline workflows

Where Do You Begin?

When considering DAM, it is important to have a clear understanding of the users and use cases of those who will be using the DAM solution. Doing so will provide you the insight to set up the correct taxonomy for your users, resulting in successful search and filtering options based on defined categories or buckets, labels, tags, and metadata for your assets. It is important to note that DAM is not only for internal use. At Phase2, our clients are users too, and they often need access to assets housed in our DAM solution. An organized DAM solution, customized to your specific needs, will benefit everyone both internally and externally resulting in happy users who can locate their assets where and when they need them.

DAM is Not One-Size-Fits-All  

While there are many DAM solutions out there, it’s important to make sure to find the right DAM solution to fit your needs. For example, at Phase2 we need a DAM that:

• Has a pricing model aligned with our user and admin needs
• Is easily searchable
• Allows for integrations with Adobe and Drupal
• Has an intuitive interface (think online experiences like Amazon and Netflix)
• Has external facing pages for a curated, asset-sharing experience
• Is easily maintained
• Has a team for implementation and support
• Offers lightboxes and/or saved searches
• Has the ability to post updates/notifications
• Has portals for user groups to find their content

We plotted all of these criteria and their associated benefits on a scorecard to make our final decision:

With these boxes checked, Phase2 is set up for a successful DAM experience specific to the needs of our company which will result in wide-spread adoption. While all DAM solutions will house your media assets, some act as a smaller asset library experience while others have full editing and approval capabilities within the solution itself. When choosing the right DAM solution for your business, you will be most successful if you define your needs early in the process to find the right fit for you. It is also important to look at the implementation and support you receive when deciding on a DAM partner because the solution will only be as successful as the time and effort you put in from the start.

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