Organizations are made up of people, and initiatives fail unless those people are managed well and given the right tools. One of the best ways to manage people is to define their role clearly: what they own, what they are accountable for, and who they work with. Far from limiting people, clear roles empower them to take ownership. DAM is a cross-functional program, so it needs that clarity too. Here are the five core roles.
1. Program governance team
Where the buck stops. They are accountable for the program's success or failure, even if not its daily operations. Their work: high-level KPI reporting to other business units, program initiatives, governance guidelines and standards, change management, and ownership of budget and procurement.
2. Digital asset administrator
Sometimes called the DAM Manager, this role executes the strategy the governance team sets. In smaller or newer programs it is often combined with the governance role, but it outgrows one person as DAM expands. Their work: creating and refining workflows and standards, building training materials and documentation, onboarding and managing users, platform certifications, and scoping special projects and integrations. See the DAM manager role in depth.
3. Digital asset librarian
Often the most important role in a successful program, because they do the day-to-day work that makes it run. The number of librarians scales with program size. Their work: regular ingestion, metadata enrichment, and publication of new, archival, and special-collection assets; final approval and curation; and library auditing, cleansing, and archiving.
4. Digital asset creators
The people producing assets every day. How they use the program affects everyone else, so they must be trained and resourced to stay in their lane. Their work: creating assets according to brand guidelines and content strategy, and submitting them through the approval workflow.
5. DAM end-users
The people who find and use assets to hit business objectives in marketing, sales, customer service, and beyond. Their work: responding to usability feedback requests, raising DAM issues through proper channels, and following the team's guidelines and documentation.
This article adapts a piece from the Stacks blog. These roles look different from brand to brand, but defining and communicating them is critical everywhere.
Key takeaways
- Five roles: governance team, administrator, librarian, creators, end-users.
- Governance owns strategy; the administrator executes it; the librarian runs daily operations.
- Roles can be combined early and split as the program grows.
- Creators and end-users are roles too, because their behavior affects the whole system.