Taking a Collaborative Approach to DAM: The Importance of Marketing and IT Synergy

Written By Mickey Aharony Sep-25-2017 4 Min Read

There are a lot of cool and useful marketing technology and tools available today. As a part of the marketing team at Cloudinary, we must identify and recommend the solutions that will scale and optimize our ability to reach, and effectively engage with, our prospects. One of the most critical tools, perhaps, is a digital asset management (DAM) solution, which I discussed in an earlier article here.

Digital Asset Management (DAM) isn’t simply a storage solution or a way to consolidate and organize images and videos. In reality, it helps orchestrate unique customer experiences, at scale, across various channels. With DAM, you can manage your continually growing media library from a central hub, enabling various teams to categorize and organize files, collaborate more seamlessly, and monitor usage and performance. DAMs are designed to improve productivity across different teams within your company that need to use assets consistently across different channels – such as website, social media, eCommerce store, blogs, and share with partners and digital agencies.

While it may be marketing’s responsibility to evaluate and recommend a DAM solution at your company, ultimately the decision also depends on how easily this DAM will integrate with your current systems. That being said, it’s critical you work hand-in-hand with IT to ensure that the selected DAM solution can integrate and deliver even greater benefits to all facets of the business.

As you evaluate solutions for managing your digital assets, here are some points to consider:

Work Together Toward a Common Goal – Ultimately, IT, marketing and other departments within your company all share a common goal: in our case it’s optimizing the end-user experience. This singular focus needs to be front and center as technology is evaluated and implemented by all stakeholders.
Develop a Culture of Collaboration – In many companies, there may be a disconnect between IT and marketing, as each group works at a varying paces and has different objectives to meet. By educating employees and overcoming departmental stereotypes, a company can foster a more collaborative environment that supports the above-mentioned common goal.
Define the Need – Are you recommending a significant, long-term project that impacts core infrastructure, or is your DAM an application that can be easily implemented to address your needs today? Collaboration with IT can help you answer this question and develop a realistic timeline for deployment.
Avoid the Rube Goldberg Dilemma – In an effort to put digital media in some sort of order, marketing teams often patch together a mix of free and low-cost solutions, like Dropbox, Google Drive and Excel. While these applications may work initially, they will not scale to meet enterprise-level needs.
Balance Speed with IT Governance – The consumerization of technology has given marketing professionals more tools that they can quickly implement to address their changing needs. But these tools often bypass IT governance and introduce potential security concerns. By working closely with your company’s architecture experts, you can more quickly implement a cutting-edge technology while reducing the resistance that may arise from security or integration concerns, as well as the time it takes to define requirements and specifications, and test the solution extensively within the network.
Eliminate the Silos – Because DAM has historically been under the purview of marketing, it has tended to be siloed off from the rest of the company. However, C-level executives now understand the importance of DAM as a critical enterprise application for other departments, which requires it to be more fully integrated into other systems. IT will offer valuable insights into how your preferred DAM solution can integrate into these systems and work hand-in-hand to benefit the entire organizations.

Working with IT Delivers Results

When you work closely with IT to select and implement a DAM solution, you achieve more than simply ensuring digital assets are available across your organization. This marketing/IT partnership can: