When someone reminds you it’s good practice to go to your doctor once a year for a physical check-up, you may respond, “I feel healthy and strong. I’m not sure I need to carve out the time for that this year.” However, if you don’t follow their advice, you’ll be missing an opportunity to save tons of time and money down the road.
Having your general practitioner regularly perform a physical exam is important for two reasons. First, an exam makes you aware of baseline metrics or “vital signs” such as blood pressure and pulse rate to pay attention to throughout the year. Second, your doctor can identify or address problems with your health and give you specific recommendations and prescriptions for managing them tailored to your unique needs.
Routinely having a physical exam saves you both time and money since it allows you to be proactive when caring for your body rather than reactive. You can work to achieve and maintain good health and also address any unique requirements your body may have, saving you from more serious health problems down the road.
The same principle applies to your organization’s digital asset management (DAM) program. Monitoring your program’s vitals and addressing your unique DAM requirements is key to your continued success and increasing, rather than decreasing, ROI. We cover the basics of tracking your DAM program’s vitals in this other (still awesome!) article. Here, we outline three core ways to determine your unique DAM requirements and how to address them.
Identifying Your DAM Program’s Unique Needs
Everyone’s body is different and so are the goals we each have for what we want to do with our bodies. Because of this, the care and treatment we give ourselves are unique to each person. The same is true for an organization's digital asset management system. So, how can you determine what the unique needs of your DAM program are, and how you should treat it so it can achieve what you want it to?
1. Map Out Your Most Critical Workflows
One way to proactively identify how to care for your body the right way is to figure out what goals you have physically. An NBA player and a salesperson working a nine to five don’t use their bodies the same way. They need different workout routines in order to achieve their goals. Even two professional athletes in different sports need to build different muscle groups or take different kinds of supplements.
The same principles apply to DAM. The goal of any DAM program is to maximize the value of digital assets by making them available for use by the organization. Sit down with your primary stakeholders and end-users and determine which workflows are the most important to them. What needs to work well from a high level? What standards and processes go into making these workflows truly “flow”? How can your DAM manager or DAM management team ensure that these vital standards and processes run smoothly? What kind of routine maintenance and analysis can they do to proactively improve these workflows so they don’t break with increased volume or scale?
2. Pay Attention to Where You’re Failing
Another way your doctor can quickly identify ways your body is unique is by asking questions about where it may be failing. When do you feel exhausted? What hurts? When? What kinds of foods upset your stomach? Based on this information, they can prescribe solutions to help support your body where it's weak.
Ask the same kinds of questions about your DAM program. Where is it falling behind? What goals isn’t it achieving consistently? What kinds of activities push the systems to their limits or break them? What causes end-users to complain, get frustrated, or stop using the systems? Getting a good sense of your DAM system’s bottlenecks allows your team to quickly diagnose problems and deploy solutions.
3. Get a DAM Checkup
When it comes to identifying and managing our body’s unique requirements, we ask a medical professional to diagnose our problems, prescribe treatment, and monitor our vital signs. While we may know our goals and be aware of our deficiencies, we need an expert to help us fix what’s broken and improve our overall health so we can achieve our goals. Our doctor may know our limits even better than we do and can provide the support we didn’t know was possible.
The same is true for your DAM program. You can have all the answers to the questions above, but may still need help to develop solutions or implement them. Perhaps you don’t have a fully-functional DAM program in place and need help getting started. Maybe your asset library is a mess and needs the DAM equivalent of surgery or physical therapy. No matter where you are in the process, a DAM expert can help. If you want to be proactive in how you manage your valuable digital assets rather than reactive, if you want to achieve your goals more often and ensure your DAM program is scalable and long-lasting, contact Stacks! Our team of DAM experts is happy to help.
