Fun? Really?
Isn’t that a bit of a stretch?
In a career that spans over decades, my most gratifying work included deploying and supporting Digital Asset Management systems. From a business point of view, the company immediately benefits as users start sharing assets after launch.
But the cool thing about supporting DAM’s is the ability to use my noggin when challenges arise. I recently managed a DAM where assets had been entered for several years without any supervision. As a result, we faced these issues:
- None of the 8,000 assets in the DAM had descriptive titles (unless you can glean information from an image called img_dt_20398_clk)
- There was no metadata
- There was no listing of usage rights
- All users used the same (one) single login, which, incidentally, had admin rights
Over the course of several weeks, we addressed most of the concerns: assets were titled, metadata was developed and applied, and account roles were created and distributed. But the stickiest of all the issues was that usage rights were not displayed. Our client had several contracts with photographers — each contract had defined usage rights — but which photographer shot which images and videos? Without this information, users assumed that all assets in the DAM were available free for unfettered usage. They weren’t.
We sat down with a few of the photographers – the 20% that had shot 80% of the content — but we couldn’t nail down all the assets. Ouch! We actually had to start problem solving!
We created two new metadata fields: camera and camera lens. A photographer’s camera is like a fingerprint: once we had identified which camera was used on an asset, we could associate the asset with its photographer. To have the native metadata appear in the new fields, we had to re-load all the assets. About 95% of those now reflected the camera information. In the (rare) case when photographers used the same camera, we next looked at the lens. Once we had made the association between assets and photographers, we could confidently display associated usage rights with the DAM. The issue had been resolved. Whenever I talk about DAM preparation — whether in my book or my blog posts — I hammer incessantly about the need to get usage rights organized before you deploy.
In no other activity that I’ve dealt with have I regularly faced issues that required me to think, and this always kept DAM support fun and fresh for me. And this is only one recent example: I could brag about more (but then, to remain honest, I would need to confess about all the problems that I caused. We’ll leave that for another blog!)