A global pharmaceutical company’s Marketing and Creative Services Group stored its marketing collateral and reference pieces in a leading commercial digital asset management (DAM) software product. The product was not optimally configured when it was originally installed.
After struggling for several years, the Group’s head decided it was time to improve the system and make it truly effective. As a first step, he wanted to collect user feedback about what new features and functionality his staff required and to develop a set of improvement recommendations and an implementation roadmap. He launched an enhancement initiative to improve the current deployment.
Iknow started with a current state assessment. The project team analyzed the current system implementation, the business processes that interacted with or used the digital asset library, and the organization’s current role and responsibility assignments. Iknow conducted interviews with a variety of internal stakeholders and prepared process flow diagrams, information flow diagrams, and decision maps for the important business steps.
The project team developed a comprehensive set of 38 improvement recommendations covering content architecture/metadata design, user interface, connections between the assets, workflow integration, access by advertising agencies, asset expiration and asset archiving, search, content creation guides, and personalization.
Iknow created a comprehensive taxonomy framework for the DAM system. This deliverable included the metadata and controlled vocabularies for tagging the documents in the digital asset library and a taxonomy for browse and faceted navigation.
A three-phase implementation roadmap was developed. Phase 1 focused on content architecture and system enhancements. Phase 2 focused on content enrichment, implementing technical enhancements, and designing and implementing business process and organizational changes. Phase 3 expanded the company’s investment in and use of the digital assets and the DAM system.
The pharmaceutical company followed Iknow’s recommendations and roadmap to upgrade the system’s functionality. Users were highly satisfied with the expanded capabilities and improved ease of use. Management achieved lower costs and higher levels of productivity.