President/Founder of DPCI

As President and Founder of DPCI, Joe directs business operations, all innovation initiatives, and business development activities of the company.

Joe enjoys writing and speaking about various trends in content technologies, on project management best practices, and also on his insights into the operations of running the business of DPCI.

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February 07, 2012

On Measuring the Progress of your Digital Asset Management system rollout

Here is a blog by digital asset management industry guru and blogger, Henrik DeGyor, on how organizations can use data to measure how well their DAM rollout is going.

I agree wholeheartedly that one characteristic feature of an 'enterprise' DAM is a built-in reporting tool, or a ready-made integration with some reporting software. However, for organizations that can't afford to purchase a high end asset management repository that includes reporting, there are still options out there for creating the reports using a variety of commercial solutions. In this case, you need to have a good understanding of the DAM's data model, which would require some training (or poking around).

Data analysis can be misleading unless the company has a clear sense of what key performance indicators they need to track. For instance, number of downloads might be misleading because there may be 'failed' downloads that require multiple retries.

One interesting and quite doable way to track usage is based on messages sent back to the DAM from the 'publishing' tool. So for instance, if you've integrated your DAM with your CMS, then whenever a user has made a call and placed an asset on a page for the site, that data can be tracked on utilization. Likewise, if some user places an asset on an InDesign page, some DAM systems will actually allow you to track usage on-page.

A really basic KPI for measuring the success of a DAM system is user-generated database calls. I say user-generated, because some DAM systems are chatty on the back end. So you rightly assess that the more people using the system and the more requests they make are definitely good indicators for option, although not necessarily conclusive evidence that things are going well.

This should be a session at one of the DAM conferences this year - or perhaps we should just create some webinar 'roundtable' and invite a few other people to bounce this around a bit.

Posted at 01:14 pm by Joseph Bachana

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Observations in IT Best Practices: Involving your Stakeholders 08/30/2011 - 15:43
Critique of Adweek article by Erin Griffith on "CMS Woes" 08/22/2011 - 23:26
Article on CMSWire.com about Adobe's Aspirations into Customer Experience Management 08/20/2011 - 00:34
Observations in IT Best Practices: Aim Before You Shoot 08/01/2011 - 12:46
On Innovation, Research and Development, and Passion 07/29/2011 - 14:59