9 shocks waiting for DAM rookies
When I was a DAM student in the DAM MA programme at King's College London, I took my studies incredibly seriously while retaining a wide-eyed wonder like Lucy Pevensie. But once I started working in DAM, I quickly encountered reality. As good as the MA was, as practical as I'd been, I wasn't ready for what came next. I wasn't ready for how real what I’d encountered in theory would be in practice.
So if you're in the MA programme, your company has just put you in charge of a DAM or you're trying to convince your company to acquire a DAM, here are 9 shocks that could be waiting for you.
Almost no-one knows or cares about DAM / this is a niche discipline that's little known despite the massive value it offers. As such, very few people will care about it. This factor is exacerbated by it being difficult to define what DAM is as it's foundation layer technology and multifaceted. Technically, it's software for the storage and management of files that are valuable to the company, but it can do so much else that this definition is incomplete
Cost / when you learn just how expensive DAM systems can be, then that can blunt even your passion. And if you're shocked by this, imagine how difficult it'll be to find someone in your company willing to spend five, six or seven figures on a DAM system per year
Change management / one of my dissertation research participants said that the difficult thing with change management is that everyone tells you how important it is, but no-one tells you how to do it. They were absolutely correct. Change management is important because DAM’s capabilities can frequently overturn how people work. If you read The Gulag Archipelago you'll learn that there’s nothing too horrible for people to get used to. So of course they’ll get used to bad process. Nothing about DAM will impress people so much that the majority of them will go along with what you say. Be prepared to have to repeat yourself endlessly saying the same things to the same groups for months while being told how horrible your system is. Be prepared for people to lie to you to resist change. Be prepared for them to even risk shooting the company in both feet on a global scale to protect themselves from process change. I know, it’s stupid, but people will behave in this way
Process change / as bizarre as it may sound, many people don't know why they work the way they do or the reason for certain tasks. Some steps in their process may even be workarounds that were required for systems that no longer exist, but that’s their process. This makes trying to support them through 3. more difficult than it would otherwise be. The closer it gets to DAM, eg metadata, the less likely they are to understand it
Uncovering what’s buried / a migration from one DAM system to another will inevitably expose more and more problems with assets and with processes. It doesn't matter how much you learned or how well you prepared, changing system is like going digging in an unmapped graveyard: you're going to find horrible things
Complexity and ambiguity / as the above starts to illustrate, and only starts, DAM is complex and ambiguous. A big reason for this is that it’s so fundamental in nature that it affects everything built on top of it. Of course it affects the uploading of files and their management, but it also impacts everything associated with that. So it imacts which assets need to be uploaded, their distribution, work processes, billing of work carried out by external partners… It will never cease to amaze you how far it can reach
Integrations / and speaking of complexity, the process of integrating a DAM with additional systems so that they can take assets from the DAM is difficult. Are the systems compatible through the API? Is further development required DAM-side or consuming system-side to make the integration work? If so, can you source the necessary skills, how much will it cost, who’s paying for it, and how long will it take? Is a new mapping of fields in the DAM and consuming system required? Are you prepared for the end to end testing and UAT? Who owns the consuming system? Are they willing to play ball or are they going to LARP that they can just ignore you for months putting additional pressure on your timeline?
Come to the office / be prepared for employers to still have a ‘we want you in the office’ mindset even if the DAM system you’ll be managing is SaaS (cloud). A common ‘reason’ is ‘collaboration’ even when we’re a team of one
Disillusionment / when we come into the field with passion it’s easy to have a sense that DAM is magic. It’s so foundational, enabling so much, that it’s easy to look at it with a wide-eyed sense of wonder as if we’re stepping through the wardrobe for the first time or seeing what’s really inside the police box. Then when we experience how real it can all get (see 1 - 7 above) it’s easy to feel disillusioned. Perhaps it’s a loss of innocence that will make us better at our job, but it’s hard to feel good about it. The highest state is to retain that innocent joy in spite of the practical challenges that get thrown our way and still find something joyful about DAM
While change management is the hardest purely professional challenge we can face, the greatest challenges are those that come from within. We see the world through the filter of our own mind with all of its experiences, preconceptions, lack of knowledge, or neurological complexities. It’s much harder to master ourselves than it is to master our profession.
What of you and your experiences? Can you add anything to this list in the comments from your experiences that will benefit newcomers to DAM?