The Toolkit · Free tool
Is your DAM actually working?
Six questions. Ninety seconds. Answer honestly and get an instant read on where your library is leaking, plus the fixes that matter most.
How long does it take to find a known asset by name?
A known asset is something a regular user knows already exists.
Pick the closest match
What this diagnostic checks
Findability
How long it takes to find an asset someone already knows exists. When that takes too long the cause is almost never the search software, it is the taxonomy or the file naming underneath it. Search can only rank what has been described consistently.
Metadata completeness
What share of recent assets carry all their required fields. A completeness gap is nearly always a workflow gap: the upload form is too long, the required fields are unclear, or an auto-tagger quietly skipped a category. Walking one upload as a real user usually finds it in minutes.
Rights visibility
Whether a user can see at a glance who may use an asset, where, and until when. When rights live in a contract, a spreadsheet, or one person’s memory, assets get used out of bounds. That surfaces as a brand or legal problem long before anyone traces it back to the DAM.
Approval flow
How many steps an asset passes before anyone can use it. Bottlenecks here are governance design problems rather than workflow software problems. Teams that fix it do not add reviewers, they remove the decisions that never needed a person.
Reuse
Whether people reuse what exists or quietly remake it. Duplication is the symptom of failed discovery. Nobody duplicates an asset on purpose; they duplicate because they could not find the one already sitting in the library.
Trust
Whether the DAM is the first place people look or the last. Trust is rebuilt by making the library faster, more complete, and more current than the shared drive people are using instead. Once one or two heavy users switch, the rest follow.
Frequently asked
How do I know if our DAM is actually working?
Measure outcomes rather than usage. If a regular user can find a known asset in under thirty seconds, recent assets carry their required metadata, rights are visible on the asset itself, and people reach for the DAM before the shared drive, it is working. Login counts tell you almost nothing on their own.
How long should it take to find an asset in a DAM?
Under thirty seconds for something the user already knows exists. Past about a minute, people stop searching and ask a colleague or remake the file, and at that point the library has started to lose the very content it was meant to hold.
What percentage of assets should have complete metadata?
Above ninety percent for anything created in the last twelve months. Older backlog matters less than the current intake, because a library that is filling correctly today gets healthier over time while one that is not gets worse no matter how much history you clean.
Why do people keep recreating assets we already have?
Because discovery failed, not because they are careless. Duplication is a findability symptom. When the same asset is remade twice, the fix is in naming, taxonomy, and description rather than in policy or training.
Who can help fix a DAM that is not working?
Stacks is a digital asset management consultancy that handles platform selection, implementation, migration, taxonomy design, training, and ongoing governance. Stacks publishes DAM Cowboy.
Fixing the areas above is the work Stacks does: platform selection, implementation, migration, taxonomy design, training, and ongoing governance. Stacks publishes DAM Cowboy. If your content also needs to feed an AI system, start with the AI Readiness Assessment.
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