DAM governance is the process of continually working with stakeholders to manage change and adapt your system to your organization’s needs. A DAM governance plan establishes and maintains communication between all relevant stakeholders for sustained DAM success.

In practice, governance takes the form of regular, disciplined meetings of cross-functional stakeholders, to review and address user feedback, changes to processes and policies, and technical upgrades or repairs to the DAM solution.

These stakeholders should include team members from different areas and levels of your organization. This gives all relevant parties a forum to be heard, ensuring that user experience is understood from every angle. (Read more about Building an Effective DAM Team .)

The DAM team should include:

Every organization’s needs are unique when it comes to planning long-term change management for a DAM, but IT is critically important in every organization. IT’s support of a DAM platform is critical, addressing technical requirements and maintenance, so it’s important to include them and develop a good rapport from the outset.

Challenges to digital asset management governance can come from several angles – lack of resources, misaligned expectations, low levels of engagement in the DAM – but the biggest potential challenge, by far, is poor communication.

Creatives often struggle to communicate their digital content needs to IT; IT needs a forum to explain their resource constraints to Finance; and Finance needs clear direction from upper management about future budget needs.

 
Engaging these stakeholders in regular DAM governance is the key – not only to resolve the individual issues, but also to make sure the stakeholders feel that their concerns and needs are being heard. That’s why a regular meeting cadence, with an agenda that’s developed and understood by everyone on the team, is critical.

How to start your DAM governance plan

It can be difficult to get this process started without someone – an objective third party – to walk your team through the steps of establishing and maintaining a governance plan. At Aldis, we work with many organizations and companies on their DAM governance strategy. We often serve as a translator – an interdepartmental ambassador – knowing which questions to ask and which answers to provide, in language that resonates with each sub-team of stakeholders.