Historically, DAMs, such as Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Assets, have been managed by enterprise IT departments. As the content landscape rapidly evolves, marketing leaders have become increasingly interested in streamlining, automating, and governing how content is managed within their DAMs.
AEM Assets is at the center of delivering personalized customer experiences. However, to reach this point, it’s important to explore and understand the needs of both your organization and your team. Though each organization’s DAM infrastructure needs are unique, there are three key areas that organizations must tackle to achieve personalization at scale:
- Establishing governance to allow for democratization and collaboration while having the right safeguards in place to avoid human error
- Auditing your team's processes to identify opportunities for workflow automation, helping to streamline operations and eliminate repetitive tasks
- Developing information architecture that creates the right conditions for content searchability, reuse, and personalization at scale
While making these changes can be time-consuming and daunting, it lays the groundwork for the long-term efficiency and effectiveness of your content. This helps create a content ecosystem that encourages efficient use, reuse, leveraging, and analytics of content.
AEM Infrastructure: Three Core Elements
#1 – DAM Governance for Marketing Success
One of the main reasons why your DAM might be working against rather than for your marketing team is likely linked to governance issues.
Whether it’s multiple users working toward the same project, leading them to overwrite each other's work, or users working in a silo causing redundant work, this inefficiency not only eats away at your organization’s productivity but also wastes precious time.
For example, imagine if you lost 10 minutes of efficiency per content piece. Multiply that by 10 monthly content pieces across 10 employees and that amounts to 16 hours, or two full workdays, lost monthly.
When governance is a well-oiled machine, users are in the correct roles with the appropriate level of permissions. Users aren’t given too much access where the risk of error opens, nor do they have too little access that limits them on their job function.
Marketing-oriented DAM governance ensures users can access and manipulate assets within AEM while maintaining quality, security, and scalability. Examples of user roles in AEM include:
- Administrator: Oversees AEM management, setting user permissions and maintaining system configurations.
- Content Author: Can create, edit, and delete content using AEM tools for web design and asset management.
- Content Approver: Can review, approve, or reject content for quality and compliance before publication.
- Site Visitor: Can view published content but is unable to modify assets.
Providing gradations of access enables teams to split the difference between the democratization of content and protecting against human error. This allows organizations to gain efficiencies while avoiding costly rework that can take hours to correct.
For organizations aiming to rethink governance in their AEM instance, consider these change management steps we've implemented with clients, which have consistently resulted in success:
- Conduct discovery to learn who is doing what and where within your DAM.
- Establish documentation that explains your DAM’s policies, access control, roles and responsibilities, and business processes, which also helps to secure alignment.
- Review documentation regularly and update as adoption increases and your organization matures.
- Continue to evolve your DAM. Regularly review governance practices and adapt roles and permissions to meet changing needs.
- Conduct training sessions to align users with strategic goals, ensuring your DAM remains a powerful tool for organizational growth.
- Foster open communication and feedback, and establish a governance committee to oversee updates.
#2 – Workflow and Automation
According to Adobe, most teams waste 21 or more hours weekly on manual design tasks that could be automated. Leveraging automation is a key step in getting the most from your AEM investment. Streamlining your organizational efficiency through automation will help target repetitive tasks to expedite processes in your DAM.
To identify the manual tasks that are eating away at your team’s time, conduct one-on-one interviews to learn how they use AEM and their typical workflows.
Oftentimes, users accustomed to repetitive tasks may not recognize more efficient workflows. A DAM librarian plays a crucial role in engaging with users to identify these manual tasks and spearhead the implementation of automation solutions. This strategic approach not only refines workflows but also substantially enhances operational efficiency.
Below are two opportunities for organizations to begin leveraging workflow automation:
- Approval workflows: To streamline your approvals process, create an approval workflow in AEM by defining the necessary steps and assigning specific roles to ensure timely reviews and decision-making, enhancing efficiency and consistency.
- Content retention workflows: To ensure data cleanliness in your AEM instance, develop a retention policy for documents and assets. This ensures outdated or expired assets are removed or archived, and they aren’t taking up valuable space in your instance.
#3 – Proper Information Architecture
A staggering 25 percent of content is wasted due to redundant and siloed content creation (Adobe). This content waste underscores the vital need for proper information architecture.
When there’s no efficient way to search and access content, your organization’s productivity will be severely hindered. Whether the assets are stored in siloed and redundant repositories owned by separate teams, or a lack of a naming and folder convention prevents users from accessing the content they need, this inefficiency limits your organization’s ability to reach maturity.
Proper information architecture enables your organization to scale efficiently, enhance asset reuse, and improve searchability, facilitating easier access to assets and creating an intuitive experience for content creators and authors.
However, the relationship between information in your DAM can be complex to explore. Here are the components involved:
Taxonomy is the classification of assets that helps future-proof your DAM. This effort will empower search, asset reuse, and personalization. Developing a taxonomy is a process of utilizing common classification principles to define the various types of assets stored in the DAM.
At the most generic level, this can include intended use, color palette, or content description. Customizing your taxonomy means matching asset categories to your organization's specific goals and needs, ensuring they are practical and useful.
Structure is the systematic organization of content based on taxonomy and organizational knowledge. This is where you’ll establish naming conventions and a folder structure. There are various strategies for folder structure; however, the key is to design the folder structure with the user's search needs in mind, ensuring it helps individuals easily locate the assets they need.
Your folder structure should reflect the way your organization "thinks" about content, which might be an organization hierarchy, an asset usage-based hierarchy, or even a hybrid approach.
Metadata is the additional data that enables the relationship between content, allowing your team to easily find assets. Your metadata is the powerhouse of the DAM, enabling personalization at scale.
To get the most out of your metadata, it must align with organizational needs and leverage the taxonomy previously addressed.
Initially, metadata is used to organize assets in a DAM and surface assets through search functions. However, as the metadata strategy matures, it can govern user access, "smart" content collections, and even workflows. Ultimately, consistent and accurate metadata improves organizational efficiency.
Unlocking the Full Potential of AEM for Strategic Growth
Is your DAM management ready to meet the content needs of today? By prioritizing effective DAM management, organizations can significantly enhance marketing efficiency and deliver personalized customer experiences. As your DAM evolves alongside your organization, it becomes a vital asset for driving innovation and achieving sustainable success.
Need help implementing these core elements? Our Adobe experts can help. Get in touch!
