The digital asset management industry has taken Australia by storm, with DAM becoming a priority within highly-regulated industries, like government and education.
The Government of Australia has spearheaded better digital governance through the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) and its Digital Service Standard initiatives, with many government agencies following the course. This has caused proper digital asset auditing and organization to become a foundational component for many digital projects.
Similar trends have emerged in the education industry, with organizations of all types being overseen by The Department of Education and Training and TEQSA. Universities, colleges and even high schools have been increasing their investments into preserving the legacy of their school and engaging their past, present and future students across multiple digital channels.
When we looked at what’s driving the success of DAM implementations across these regulated industries within Australia and New Zealand, these three factors were highly correlated with a successful DAM implementation:
- User-centric asset organization with a focus on adoption
- Alignment with the organization’s overall technology strategy
- Capacity and structure to enable future growth
Let’s dive in into each one:
User-Centric Asset Organization
A DAM’s primary purpose is to enable any user to easily find the digital assets they need to perform their job in a given company. Yet, each different group has a different use case for how the assets are leveraged and relate together. What’s the best way to organize the entire library of assets? By product line? Campaign? Collateral type? The answer will be different for every user group, but your solution needs to be able to satisfy them all.
To have a successful DAM implementation, it’s important that your category structure is built to satisfy the needs of each group. One of the elegant solutions to providing easy and intuitive navigation is to create a relevant category structure for different departments or use cases and enable access for each groups for their respective categories. Each group will have a unique experience navigating, assets are stored once, and are showing up under multiple categories, each one unique to the use case.
For example, consider a retailer organizing a recent photoshoot. The eCommerce team needs the assets organized into product categories, while the digital marketing team needs them organized by season. A flexible category structure allows these assets to be stored in both these categories, without the need for duplication. User group permissions also ensure that the eCommerce and product marketing teams only see the categories relevant to their needs, ensuring a streamlined experience.
An Australian government agency that’s using MediaValet for managing and distributing of their assets worldwide uses this approach for their category structure. MediaValet only stores any given asset once, but the agency displays the asset across multiple categories, to best suit each user’s needs. With custom user permissions, the agency ensures that each unique user group has completely different viewing and navigation experiences relevant to their functions, regardless of logging into the same MediaValet library.
Aligning with Corporate Strategy
The first priority for any DAM project is to find a solution with a feature set that aligns with the team’s core DAM use case. But, most digital asset management systems on the market can satisfy the majority of core feature requirements. Not all solutions, however, can gain the support and approval of corporate IT, who often controls sign-off on any new technology. With this in mind, in addition to aligning with your digital asset management challenges, a DAM project needs to align with the overall corporate IT roadmap.
Stephane Klein, APAC Regional Manager at IO Integration shared that "One of the trends driving the transformation in regulated industries is acceptance of cloud-based technologies while implementing secure, compliant platforms, like Microsoft Azure, as part of the technology roadmap."
MediaValet, for example, aligns well with a Microsoft strategy, as it’s built on Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform. When a company is already using existing Microsoft technology, such as Office 365, Active Directory or Microsoft Teams, it often means that IT has already tested and is comfortable with Azure’s reliability, as well as its compliance and security commitments. It also allows MediaValet to tie more easily into the overall corporate strategy and multiply ROI through increased adoption and system integrations.
Planning for Growth
Many industry experts site Crawl-Walk-Run as the best approach to a digital asset management implementation. This approach emphasizes starting simple, before expanding to other teams and technology connections. It’s important to consider your growth and scope when budgeting for a DAM, taking into consideration which teams and platforms you’ll be expanding into. DAM value is realized when corporate assets are actively used across multiple users and groups, so when per-user costs get in the way, it can stifle the efficacy of the platform.
MediaValet uses an unlimited user licensing model, rather than a license-based approach. It accounts for the initial implementation scope and allows for future growth via other teams, agencies, acquisitions, integrations and more. One of the phases of MediaValet’s customer success program is the “growth phase”, in which customer success helps to identify opportunities for maximizing DAM benefits and identifying new use cases without having to justify additional budget.
Additional Considerations
These are the most common success factors we experience when working with organizations in the governments and education sectors in Australia, but they aren’t the only factors to take into consideration when selecting a DAM. To better understand what to consider when looking for a DAM as an Australian company, be sure to also read 2 Important Considerations When Selecting a DAM in Australia.
