A portal governance plan is essential for maintaining an organized, reliable, and scalable DAM. By defining clear responsibilities and workflows, you can keep your DAM effective, aligned with organizational needs, and supportive of long-term user adoption.
Learn more about content governance here.
Governance Planning and Documentation
Use the Governance Planning Worksheet to outline how you will manage your DAM and make updates over time. Whether you’re launching your DAM or creating a governance plan for the first time, this worksheet can help. Take the time to complete the worksheet or write down your responses to the following key questions:
- Who owns the strategy for your DAM?
- Who is in charge of decision-making about your DAM?
- What assets belong in your DAM? What kinds of assets do not belong in your DAM and where should they be kept instead?
- How often will you make changes to your taxonomy? Who will be responsible for making those changes? How will users request changes or updates?
- How will you provide support to your users when they have questions? How will new users be added to the DAM and how will they be trained?
- How often will you review your assets and archive or delete those that are no longer needed?
Best practices
- Assign governance roles, not individuals: Distribute governance responsibilities across specific roles or job descriptions rather than assigning them to a single person. This approach ensures continuity and accountability, even during staff transitions.
- Consider hiring a dedicated DAM admin for larger teams: For larger organizations, a dedicated DAM administrator can oversee governance, enforce best practices, and ensure the system evolves alongside your team's needs. This role can significantly enhance consistency, scalability, and overall DAM performance.
- Set clear metadata expectations: Define and communicate metadata requirements to ensure all assets in your DAM are well-organized and easily discoverable. Provide examples or templates to guide users and regularly review metadata quality through audits or training.
- Define and track success metrics: Establish measurable metrics to evaluate your DAM governance plan's effectiveness, such as asset discoverability or metadata completeness. Use analytics to track progress, review metrics regularly, and adapt your approach based on insights. Learn more about measuring success and adoption here.
- Document lessons learned: Record lessons learned refine workflows, improve reference materials, and enhance project plans for future updates.
Ongoing Maintenance
Governance is not a one-time activity; it requires consistent effort to ensure your DAM remains organized and efficient. For detailed weekly and monthly maintenance recommendations, refer to the DAM Admin Guide, which includes recommendations for activities in the DAM, including:
- Daily: Check for new upload, download, and user requests.
- Weekly: Refresh your homepage.
- Quarterly: Audit your taxonomy and users (evaluate, edit, archive, remove, report).
- Yearly: Audit your taxonomy, users, permission profiles/user groups, homepage, and other modules when applicable.
Use the DAM Management Tasks Spreadsheet to document the ongoing tasks, their frequency, and the person responsible.
Where to store your Governance Doc
We recommend saving your governance plan as a PDF and uploading it to your DAM. For easy access, consider linking it on your homepage via a navigation tile or quicklink.
Other options include storing the plan in:
- A shared knowledge base or intranet.
- Your Onboarding Workbook, created during your Bynder onboarding.
Advanced Governance for Strategic DAMs
For organizations requiring a more comprehensive approach, the Governance Workbook offers advanced tools to deepen your governance strategy. This resource includes discussing and creating:
- A mission statement for your DAM.
- Detailed guidelines on assets, users, and taxonomy.
- End User guidance, workflows, and best practices.
- Reporting and KPIs to discuss with your Customer Success Manager.
By taking the time to plan and document your DAM governance, you can ensure it remains a valuable, sustainable resource for your organization.