What are the most important considerations when planning the introduction of a digital asset management system?

Question

Rather than ask how long is a piece of string I was hoping that as a non-techie the community might give their top piece(s) of advice of do's and don'ts. Not just to recommend particular pieces of software but, for example, it might be about the business process (eg make sure you have appropriate metadata for your assets) or about being realistic about what any one piece of software might achieve. If you do recommend one system over another it would be helpful to know why.

Answer 1

My favorite piece of advice is "pick software LAST." I say this after seeing horrendous mismatches between what people thought software would do -- what they wanted it to do -- and what it actually did in practice.

Some things to do and questions to ask before you go software-hunting:

• What kinds of content will you be working with?
• How are you planning to get hold of content? Doodle up the workflows you think you'll need, paying especial attention to listing the people who will be doing the work, and to the sequence in which work events are likely to happen in your shop. (Don't forget batch work! One-item-at-a-time is deadly when the software makes it your only option.)
• How would you like to present the content to end-users? Doodle up some wireframes.
• What security/access-control needs do you have for (any or all of) the content?
• What will you be doing by way of metadata? Are there standards you need your software to support? What if anything do you plan to do about missing metadata, bad metadata, Other People's Metadata?

Good luck!