David Bercovici, Project Manager, Strategic Publishing Operations, Hachette Book Group

DB: Well I think the big challenge with them overall is that people don’t necessarily see importing assets into a DAM as part of their workflow. That’s always been part of the Holy Grail for us, of DAM. To devise a system and workflow where people just see it as part of their job. More specifically, where people are interacting with the DAM without even knowing it. That’s the ultimate workflow.

I think over the years, we’ve made a lot of headway with that, where people understand that this is part of their job. But yet it is still oftentimes an extra step they have to perform. Even if they know they have to do it. They still have to do that extra step of putting that file one extra place instead of just having it on their departmental share on a server. They also have to put it into this DAM.

It’s those extra steps outside their workflow that we’re trying to minimize.

MM: I’m curious, David. What sort of incentives or job definitions or weekly reporting requirements management may have put in, so as to make the creation and tagging of assets more just a seamless part of peoples’ work?

DB: Well, over the years, some of it has been a matter of training. Something we did quite a while ago, actually — I think it’s probably something like five or six years ago — we got all the managers together. We told them, “All right. We’ve had our system for about a year and a half and we need to create more commitment and accountability for people utilizing the system”.

We pointed out to them that there were some inconsistencies in people getting content into the system. In our workflow, we don’t have the luxury of what some other companies have, where they have a dedicated squad of librarians who are sitting there all day importing assets and tagging them with metadata. Here it’s the content owners that are doing it.

These are people who have — in effect — real jobs to do in creating the content of the company. Putting content on the DAM is part of their process, but still, it’s not the primary reason they’re here.

So when we brought the managers together, it was partially to get their buy-in to this. Also, following that, we started doing some reporting for assets that we could predict when they needed to be in the DAM, based on the stage of the publishing cycle of a book. We could say, ” These cover images are due as of this date or as of this point in the publishing cycle, or these production files are due as of a month or a week before the book publishes.” Something along those lines. In effect we were creating a compliance process.

So at least then we had a mechanism to track how people were doing, and to make sure that at least people would be able to find what it was they were looking for. Then we could chase people down and say, ” You missed this import,” or something along those lines. That’s one of the most direct things we tried to do.

I should also note that it’s not all about getting content in the system. The consumers of the content are just as liable for the success of the system. We can’t ask for our art department to import cover images if the next day they get ten calls from people in sales or editorial asking them to send them the same cover image. So everyone has to buy into using the system as their primary source for the relevant content or it just doesn’t work.

Over the years, we’ve had what we call “super-users.” Each department in effect has a representative who’s supposed to be both the knowledge expert on our system — which we refer to as the “Vault.” They’re the knowledge expert in our Vault system. They’re supposed to also advocate it and whenever we’re collecting the requirements — like when we did this assessment process — they represent the department as far as voicing what their needs are, in raising any issues, and making change requests.

That’s another one of the things we’ve done to try to reinforce processes and identify any new tweaks that need to be made to peoples’ workflow or the system itself.

MM: One of the things in our other interviews that we’ve heard is that some of the more mature advanced DAM installations have — one — made the creation of files to a particular standard part of the technical definition of an asset-creator’s job. Part of the job definition entails a description of their role and responsibility in producing assets.

The second one was a weekly or a monthly managerial reporting system from the front line. It included the number of files created and the number of assets that were tagged. Its just basically counting, “What did you do and what was the activity associated with it?” It seems that just the act of counting something changes the behavior associated with it.

The third thing that we’ve found — and only in a few cases — this is where you had multiple divisions within a larger corporation. They created an internal stock-media market where divisions basically bought and sold graphics or artwork from other divisions, but usually at 1/10 the fair market price.

In so doing, they monetized the value of a particular piece of file, and created an economic incentive — at least at the level of whoever owned the P&L for the division. They created a financial incentive to make sure that all the troops were — one: creating assets, two: tagging it, and three: promoting them for reuse. And they even went so far as to create an incentive system. A bonus program, whereby the individuals that were creating the highest-quality assets that were most-tagged got special awards and acknowledgments and even some cash bonuses and things like that.

DB: That’s an interesting program.

MM: Yes.

DB: I was going to say, for us, the reporting that we’ve had was more focused on what people are putting in. Trying to enforce it from that side. Doing more tracking in terms of usage is something we haven’t had in the past. That’s something that I think we’ll be doing in the near future.

We’re hoping that in the new system, at least at an asset level, the North Plains system allows you to see what usage a particular asset has. For enforcement of intellectual property protection, that’s a good thing to have. But since that information is floating around in there somewhere, we’re hoping we’ll be able to do more robust reporting on that to track usage.

Then, in terms of the individual users and the jobs they’re doing — we have formalized somewhat more our super-user program. It’s not considered a job unto itself, but now it is considered a formal aspect of these peoples’ roles. They’re not the only people putting content into or pulling content from the system. But their role has been more formalized, and their role as a super-user requires approval from their manager so that there’s awareness and approval that they are taking on this additional responsibility. This role extends beyond just our DAM. These super-users are also provided with some additional reward for their services.

MM: Yes. That’s great. We’ve found that the super-user or ambassador or master practitioner — a lot of different labels for the same thing — for calling out individuals that are the in-department peer. They lead the other people in the department to good use of the system. Those have all been really great programs.

Whether you institute a formal incentive program or not, at least you have the social network part of that in place, and that’s great.

Another thing that we’ve seen in a handful of mature DAM sites has been convening user groups. The user groups get together once a quarter or twice a year. It’s generally an off-site, one-day thing where they review the current state of the system, what they like and what they don’t like. What they want to do next.

In some of these cases, we’ve seen — using some ballots — kind of a rating on a scale of 1 to 10 of the kinds of new features they’d like to see. In some cases, they’ll bring in subject matter experts. Say, for example, in color-managed workflows. Kind of taking it to the next level in terms of ICC color management — or script automations, be they AppleScript or Adobe Actions or whatever.

Again, all these little short-stroke tactical enhancements to the workflow and the quality of work life. Really creating what we now call an academy of peers, so that we start having cross-fertilization of a bunch of these little process innovations that are usually just a pocket of excellence in one part of the group, but never really propagate because that group never really interacts with the rest of the enterprise. Does that make sense?

DB: Yes.

MM: How would you see that working out at — say, for example — Hachette?

DB: Well, we do try to convene user groups in-house. The only offsite we did was the one I mentioned earlier with the managers. That was more of a buy-in session than a refining of processes or anything like that. We do bring together our super-users, though, to talk through process issues or change requests and things of that nature.

In our company, there are different divisions. They don’t compete against each other or anything like that, but just because of the “organic evolution” of the company — because we used to be separate companies that merged over the years — there are different workflows.

So while we haven’t pushed too hard…

MM: David, not only are there different workflows — there are different tribes with their own cultural norms. Right?

DB: Some of these mergers happened quite a long time ago. It’s not quite that bad. But there are definitely differences in how the different divisions work. The thing is, in publishing, as I’m sure in any company — but certainly in any media company — you’re dealing with creative people. Sometimes you can’t really standardize a creative workflow, because some workflows aren’t quite meant for that.

Nevertheless, some process issues that some people experience when we get these user groups together and people talk about how they’re doing a particular process. Sometimes there are those a-ha moments where people hear how another group is doing their process, and say, “Oh, well, maybe we should consider doing it that way.” Sometimes that sort of thing does happen.