DEAR DR. DAM: I’m the Assistant Director of Corporate Communications for a healthcare service provider. I have to admit, it’s a little odd I’m contacting a doctor to help me with media asset management. One of my team members was tapped two years ago to find a digital asset management solution for managing assets but dropped the ball along the way. This DAM thing has again risen to the top. There are five people part of my staff and we act like an advertising agency handling all of the marketing and public relations activities for about 100 different facilities. Our facilities include hospitals, physician offices, outpatient centers, long term care facilities and retirement communities – all with similar but different needs. Here’s my situation… We’re in constant conflict with I.T. due to resource allocation problems. All assets are stored on servers and local hard drives. We have no file structure or metadata. We have an outside agency that we use only for broadcast media. I have no idea how many assets we have for certain, but it’s getting out of hand when it comes to finding things – we usually end up recreating pieces that have probably been created 100 times. I buy a lot of stock photography and would like something simple like this when it comes to managing and finding our own stuff. Please help.

DEAR CLINICAL RESEARCH KIM: I’d like to see you give serious consideration to a software as a service solution, in which all I.T. is handled by the provider – everything from implementation to ongoing support, upgrades and security. The one that I’m thinking of will help you migrate all of your existing data to their servers. Don’t worry about security and compliance being an issue – Widen has got you covered and has experience with the marcomm departments at other healthcare service providers using web based DAM. The Widen Communications team will help you set up a usable metadata structure that you can populate as you go. Ease of use is a non-issue… if you can use stock photo sites, you’re already trained on using Widen’s marketing software. When your external agency needs access to files for creation of broadcast media, all you need to do is grant them their own role with access to the files they need. By the way, don’t feel weird about contacting Dr. DAM – everyone can use some expert advice once in awhile!

http://blog.widen.com/blog/ask-dr-dam