Introducing a New Stage of Digital Asset Management Maturity
On behalf of CMSWiRE, Ralph Windsor of digital asset management (DAM) consultancy Daydream has written a series of articles outlining the “digital asset management consciousness” stages he believes organizations go through. It’s essentially a DAM maturity model, and we thought he captured the different phases of readiness and need fairly well. That said, we see the need to add one more stage to this model.
In the first article, “The Stages of Digital Asset Management Consciousness,” Windsor outlines the first three stages of DAM consciousness:
In the second and third articles, “The Next Steps of DAM Consciousness” and Part 2, Windsor goes on to explain the stages of user adoption and change management:
Windsor explains, “User adoption is so difficult in part because it involves changing the mindset of all the staff and other stakeholders. It requires many different skills: marketing and communications, education/training, human resources and a certain amount of technological understanding as well.” He then lists the stages of user adoption strategy: user profiling, awareness programs, user training, asset ingestion policies, business processes, integration and interoperability, user feedback, and auditing and user activity profiling.
The Next Stage: Granular Assets
In customer communications management (CCM), we’re most concerned with the integration and interoperability part. We’ve addressed the idea of choosing a DAM solution designed with open standards so you can build your own integrations with your organization’s various software solutions that need access to digital assets.
So, we would add another phase to Windsor’s DAM consciousness model, which is the stage at which many of our customers find themselves or will soon:
DAM Enlightened
As we’ve explained previously, the idea of what a digital asset is has evolved. Your DAM now has to be able to give employees and partners both inside and outside the organization access to traditional assets and to more granular digital components used to create consistent brand-approved assets – components such as layouts, reusable content objects, and style sheets – to provide order and consistency to the resulting communications. Therefore, we believe the next phase of DAM consciousness pertains to this.
To serve your CCM needs, your ideal DAM is one that can serve the wider array of assets — the layouts, styles, reusable content blocks, digital media and fully-formed documents — your CCM solution must draw upon to build personalized, consistent and fully-automated customer communications. We also believe that the demand for a more consistent customer experience and the need to share these more granular assets across the enterprise will drive up DAM user adoption rates. The key will be interoperability standards like CMIS4DAM, which we’ll discuss in a future blog post. Stay tuned!
This is all very exciting stuff, and we’re talking about it in our LinkedIn group for CX Architects. Come join us!