Through the AEM Assets Onboarding series of articles, best practices and Champion tips were shared on fundamental features to utilize in AEM Assets, but there is more to managing a DAM than utilizing features. This article explores DAM governance - setting policies, roles, standards, and workflows to ensure the correct and consistent use of digital assets and to be sure the team is enabled.
Putting it all together and establishing governance
Previous articles in this series touched on fundamentals which are essential to your content strategy. Those resources covered essential topics such as Best practices and tips for getting started with AEM Assets, folder structure & naming, access & permissions, metadata, taxonomy and tagging.
Next, let’s put together the what, the why and the how for establishing governance to manage AEM Assets successful.
What is DAM governance?
It is a set of policy, roles, standards, and workflows which ensures that:
- the assets are being used correctly and consistently.
- entire asset lifecycle, from creation, approval, all the way through to archival is governed.
- there is a balance of user flexibility with organizational control.
- compliance, efficiency and scalability are achieved.
- the DAM is successful.
"Think of DAM governance as the blueprint for your brand's operational success. It ensures that every digital asset is not just stored, but is compliant, discoverable, and ready to deliver value across your enterprise."
- Katie Junge, Senior Marketing Technology Product Manager at Workday and AEM Champion
Why you need it?
DAM governance provides a framework for keeping all team members on track and:
- Prevents asset misuse and unauthorized access.
- Ensures metadata standards for search and categorization.
- Promotes consistent naming conventions and taxonomy.
- Supports legal compliance (for example, licensing, GDPR).
- Enhances user accountability through roles and permissions.
"A DAM without governance quickly becomes a challenge to use. The real value of AEM Assets is unlocked when metadata, permissions, and taxonomy all work together to make content instantly usable and reusable."
- Priya Nair, AEM Technical Lead at Loblaw and AEM Champion
Now, let's go ahead and look at how to do establish governance through five key steps.
DAM governance done right
1. Set clear goals and building out the right team
- Align with the business needs, brand consistency, compliance and efficiency.
- Make sure that the right folks have a seat at the table. Depending on your business, the teams are going to differ, but make sure that to considering marketing, creative, IT, developers, all users.
2. Define standards and access policies
- Establish the folder structure, metadata schema, naming conventions, making sure that all these are configured for your business needs.
- Set role-based permissions and document any sort of usage rights that are configured on the back end in the DAM, so you don't run into any issues with legal.
3. Create and automate workflows
- Build asset approval chains with notifications.
- Document the entire asset lifecycle, from upload, to review, to approval, all the way through to archival.
4. Train users and drive adoption
- Have a very strong change management strategy.
- Offer role-based training and onboarding and a variety of opportunities for learning and consuming new information, whether that's through cheat sheets, lunch and learns, videos, etc.
- Consider the specific training needs for an admin versus a regular user versus a librarian. All three of those roles need different enablement. Don't provide irrelevant enablement, as that can impact how much they want to use the tool. See the Accelerating adoption through training and enablement guide.
5. Monitor usage and optimize
- Again, the DAM is not something that you can just set it and forget it. It is something that has to be constantly monitored.
- Use dashboards to track performance, compliance, and system health.
- Constantly evaluate and update metadata schema and tagging requirements, to support new campaigns, programs, geos, etc..
- Review and archive assets on a regular cadence, so that only relevant search results show up.
"DAM governance done right isn’t just about managing assets, it’s about empowering people. Effective DAM governance in AEM starts with the right team and clear standards; but it thrives through training. When users are empowered with the knowledge to use AEM confidently, adoption accelerates, access becomes purposeful, and the value of your digital assets multiplies."
- Melanie Bartlett, Partner Development Director at MRM and AEM Champion
Governance - one of the key foundations of using AEM Assets
This article on best practices for governance a is part of a serious of articles including foundational guidance, best practices and Adobe Champion tips for getting started with Adobe Experience Manager Assets. To explore all articles in this AEM Assets foundational series, see:
- Best practices and tips for getting started with AEM Assets
- Folder structure & naming
- Access & permissions
- Metadata, metadata schemas & metadata profiles
- Taxonomy and tagging
- Governance
- Training and enablement
Additional Learning Resources
- Watch the Adobe Experience Makers: The Skill Exhange session titled Taxonomy & Structure: AEM’s Secret to Scalable Asset Management covering this governance topic, featuring AEM Champions Melanie Bartlett and Katie Junge.
- Learn more about goverance by reading Empowering your team with a strong content governance strategy for implementation success by AEM Champion Gary Howell.
- Learn more about team enablement by reading Accelerating adoption through training and enablement by AEM Champion Erin Brown.
- Learn more about change management by reading Change Management Essentials for Success.