3 Tips to Boost Adoption of Your New Digital Asset Management System

The amazing Digital Asset Management benefits of a chosen vendor will deliver very little value if no one uses it. But it’s challenging to get individual users to believe those benefits are worth the trouble of changing how they work. And that means thinking carefully about the costs, benefits, and learning required for your users.

Everyone knows that adoption of a new product requires the benefits of the new to outweigh the costs of switching. But don’t forget that as the change agent, you see what could be more clearly and value it more highly, relative to the status quo. Your users see the situation in reverse, with the status quo as the point of reference, and fear what they may lose much more than what they may gain. A great deal of psychology research has shown that change agents overvalue new benefits by 3x and users overvalue status quo benefits by 3x, for a total gap of 9x between innovators and the users they must convince. If you have a 9x adoption hurdle to clear, what can you do? The best thing to do is to choose very carefully.

Our free eBook, Avoid the DAM Value Trap: 10 Key Questions Your DAM Vendor Doesn’t Want You to Ask, includes three key questions you should investigate carefully before choosing your vendor:

1. How much behavior change is needed to get people on board?

The less day-to-day behavior change you ask of your team, the less they’ll perceive that they’re giving something up, and the easier it will be to get them on board. People will resist changing two things most: where they store content, and how they work with it.

2. Are the benefits enticing enough to attract end users?

What do casual users get out of changing what they do today? For most users, the core functionality of DAM is finding approved assets, but unless the DAM is easier to search than a stock image catalog or sending an email request, people will continue buying the same stock over and over and hassling your digital asset managers and agencies for the content they need.

3. How easy is it to learn the new system?

Many legacy DAM systems were designed in an age where training meant large user manuals and on-site training courses. But today’s implementation and user teams don’t learn that way. In the age of consumerized enterprise software, YouTube and DIY, ease of use and ease of learning are critical to your DAM adoption. Download the ebook to learn more about what to look for and how to test vendors on each of these three topics.