The 2017 State of Digital Marketing in Higher Education
Journal of Digital Media Management Case Study
1. Like many managers who find themselves
with the responsibility of running a large,
enterprise-wide digital asset management
system, I did not set out on a career
course to do this. I did not aspire to do it.
I did not go to school for it. I did not
even train for it. I did not even know it
existed, frankly. On the contrary, I built a
career in marketing communications and
brand development for companies like
᭧ Henry Stewart Publications 2047-1300 (2012) Vol. 1, 1 000–000 Journal of Digital Media Management 1
Case study
The accidental asset manager
Received (in revised form): 18th January, 2012
Steven Brier
is a senior manager in the Field Marketing Support team at Marriott International, located in Bethesda,
Maryland. Steven is responsible for providing marketing support to 14 brands, which make up 3,600
hotels in 71 countries and territories. Currently, he is primarily responsible for the strategic planning,
development, support and oversight of the BrandWorks application. Prior to joining Marriott, Steven held
marketing positions at Washington Gas, Verizon Communications and Intelsat, Ltd. He holds a
bachelor’s degree in marketing from Colorado State University and is a Certified Scrum Professional
(CSP) and Certified ScrumMaster (CSM).
Field Marketing support, Marriott International, USA
Tel: +1 301 380-3568
E-mail: steven.brier@marriott.com
Abstract Increasingly, marketing and brand managers are finding themselves
responsible for the management, distribution and tracking of very large repositories of
digital assets used to support and even enable brand management and marketing
communications throughout their organisation. These files come in any number of video,
audio and image formats, and they must be quickly and easily accessible to be of value.
Many organisations start by using various shared network drives to manage assets, but at
a certain point, those solutions become unwieldy, and the activation of a true digital asset
management system is imperative. But doing so comes with many organisational,
technical, financial and legal challenges in addition to more complex conundrums that
come with working with people. Some of the challenges to be faced include: securing
support and cooperation across departments and across geographic regions; integrating a
new system into legacy information technology environments; consolidating disparate
asset databases (shared drives) into one centrally accessible system; gathering and
gaining agreement on technical specifications and service level agreements (SLAs) from all
stakeholders; securing budget support from many departments; and ensuring that the
system will protect the organisation’s intellectual property. This case study details the
challenges that the author experienced with activating a digital asset management system
within a global hospitality company, Marriott International.
KEYWORDS: digital asset management, marketing automation, brand activation, brand
voice, marketing portal, enterprise-wide, global
2. Washington Gas,AT&T andVerizon
Communications. I had seen the
advertising industry transition from
analogue to digital and watched with
amazement what the internet could do to
expand marketing channels and increase
sophistication for every imaginable
industry. Little did I know that this
transition would affect me in such an
unexpected way.
And so it is through pure happenstance,
good luck and a bit of misfortune that I
find myself in such a challenging, exciting
and fulfilling role at Marriott International
— the role of the Accidental Digital Asset
Manager.
When I first started in the Field
Marketing Department, I quickly realised
the tedious nature of the job. Marriott
operates in a franchise/owner model.
Unlike at many well-known global brands,
at Marriott, marketing is handled in a very
decentralised fashion.The properties
managed on behalf of the owners have
dedicated marketing staff and easy access
to many headquarter resources. In
contrast, the owners and franchisees that
simply license the brand name and operate
hotels themselves, employ their own
marketing professionals and advertising
agencies.This made communicating
strategic direction and the distribution of
materials very manual, slow, expensive and
fairly inefficient, and, in many ways,
ineffective. Questions about brand voice
and requests for assets (logos, images, etc)
came into the department in an ad hoc
fashion and were fulfilled via e-mail,
overnight and ‘snail mail’.There were so
many requests that it was rare that we in
the department could do much more than
react. Rarely were we able to act
strategically to help hotels activate
marketing and branding programmes in
the local markets where our hotels
operate.As a result, brand consistency was
nearly impossible on a global scale, and
brand recognition was very limited for
many of our ‘by Marriott’ brands.
One bright spot however, was a small
application called AdWorks, which was
custom built (by Pica9, a start-up web
application company) with the purpose of
standardising a single version of print ads
across all Marriott brands in the USA.The
tool was moderately successful because at
the time, Marriott sold all its brands in a
portfolio strategy.All brands essentially had
the same brand voice and marketing
standards with the exception of colour and
logo. Properties could create ads (and later
sales collateral) using predetermined brand
Brier
2 Journal of Digital Media Management Vol. 1, 1 000–000 ᭧ Henry Stewart Publications 2047-1300 (2012)
Figure 1: Adworks circa 2005
3. and stock photography through an
easy-to-use, step-by-step guided ‘wizard’
(Figure 1).They could even upload and
store property photography and feature it
in their communications pieces.The
system also allowed them to protect their
assets from being used by others who were
not authorised to use them through
assigning simple user roles and
responsibilities. Each property and
individual essentially had their own place
(DAM) in which to house photography,
floor plans, maps and other
property-specific assets.This was the very
beginning of the Marriott digital asset
management system.
Then in 2006, the company, bowing to
increasing consumer pressure for
authenticity, distinction and unique
experiences, changed strategic direction
and, after intense research and customer
feedback, developed distinct brand
positioning and brand identity for each
Marriott brand.This innovative change,
coupled with strong international growth
in the lodging sector, posed a monumental
challenge to a small field-marketing
organisation. No longer did the Henry
Ford approach of ‘Any customer can have
a car painted any colour that he wants so
long as it is black’ work. Now, each brand
had a unique positioning, plus
differentiated verbal and visual expression
of the brand, and there was increased
pressure for demonstrative, visible brand
distinction across the globe.
Communicating, activating and regulating
the consistent delivery of on-strategy
verbal and visual communications for
eight lodging brands worldwide with
limited staffing was impossible in the
existing structure and with the limited
available resources.
That is when the idea came to leverage
the existing, web-enabled AdWorks system
to do what it does best, only on a global
scale for eight different lodging brands.
But merely allowing more properties to
create documents was not going to suffice.
The new and improved site had to do
much more ‘heavy lifting’ if it were to be
successful.The tool had to be a self-service
portal that housed all brand voice-related
materials and information in an organised,
intuitive format. It needed to be easy to
access and use. It needed to leverage
existing systems and processes for
cost-effectiveness. It needed to be
developed using current funding sources
so that it was at no additional charge to
the owners and franchisees. It had to have
the blessing of many different
organisations and to be endorsed by key
leaders in the company. It had to become
a ‘part of the Marriott landscape’.
So I, along with my colleagues, set out
to gather specifications for the
newly-developed site. Our objective was
to create a site that could help us educate
marketing and salespeople on the new
brand positioning, and make it easy and
cost-effective for them to activate each
brand’s voice in local markets.We began to
gather requirements from users. In the
process, we made the critical mistake of
limiting input to a small subset of users
who were mostly internal users at
corporate headquarters and a few regional
marketing individuals.We based many of
our assumptions on the day-to-day
requests that were coming into the Field
Marketing Department and technical
support.We left out the most important
input — the front-line users of the tool.
Despite this fact, once requirements
were scoped, we set out to build a
‘complete’ marketing and brand voice
activation portal for all Marriott marketing
associates worldwide.We hired a technical
project management firm (Excella
Consulting) to assist with gathering
technical specifications and project
management.Thankfully, they helped us
bring rigour to our process, and to
incorporate Agile project management
methodology to our process.This saved us
᭧ Henry Stewart Publications 2047-1300 (2012) Vol. 1, 1 000–000 Journal of Digital Media Management 3
Case study: The accidental asset manager
4. from catastrophe because, despite the fact
that we did not gather key input from the
beginning, the Agile process forced us to
build in small, iterative phases where we
were able to gather additional feedback
along the way, to change direction with
minimal impact to our schedule, or to
budget and deliver only as much as was
needed and not overbuild or
over-engineer our solution.
In 2007, we launched the tool that is
known today as BrandWorks (Figure 2) to
little fanfare.The tool had some
innovative functionality, such as the ability
for properties to create sales collateral and
order from a centralised printer, and the
ability to search the database of assets
using a search query, but very few assets
to make it appealing to all markets around
the world.This prompted us to focus our
attention on growing the available assets
that would power the tool.We worked
directly with our users to understand the
types of asset (mostly images) they needed
to support their local business.We also
pulled activity logs to understand what
assets users were searching for.These
activities yielded invaluable feedback,
which was then used by our brand
marketing teams to determine where to
invest in photography assets and increase
usage of BrandWorks.As time progressed
and the brand teams developed more and
more assets, and more functionality was
built into the tool, the DAM grew to
support the surging demand.As usage
increased, so did the need for
customisation. Each regional marketing
team, property ownership group and
franchise management company wanted
to represent their properties individually
within a branded ‘voice’, but doing so
required the user to transfer images
manually from his or her standalone DAM
and upload it into BrandWorks.This
time-consuming process severely
hampered adoption, and so I embarked on
a ‘house-to-house battle’ to consolidate
databases into one, which required
convincing individual managers and
organisations to (in their minds) give up
control of their assets — not an easy sale.
Little did I know that these individuals
and departments truly believed that they
had built a DAM that was superior to the
next and that they did not really need
another system. In some respects, they
believed that their way of doing things
was a competitive advantage.There was
(and still is, to a certain extent) a reticence
to centralise anything at headquarters.The
misconception is that if something is
consolidated at HQ, there will no longer
be room for input, and the system will
lose the ability to be nimble. In order to
persuade individuals and organisations of
the idea, I had to prove to them that their
input was not only welcome, but essential.
I had to demonstrate this by rolling out
requested enhancements quickly and
announcing this by giving credit to the
person in the field who made the request.
I also had to demonstrate how
consolidating assets in a centralised DAM
would make jobs easier, save time and
money, and free up resources; and how,
using permissions and roles, we could
help people remain in control of their
assets.
Over the course of about 18 months,
we undertook the painful process of
Brier
4 Journal of Digital Media Management Vol. 1, 1 000–000 ᭧ Henry Stewart Publications 2047-1300 (2012)
Figure 2: BrandWorks 2007 to present
5. consolidating nine different databases into
the centralised repository. But as more and
more assets were amassed in the DAM,
the reputation of BrandWorks grew
through word-of-mouth, as did the
interest in the assets. Never before had an
enterprise-wide, centralised repository of
images and other digital assets existed, so
this burgeoning asset library started to
attract more and more users outside
marketing who wanted access to this
centralised, rich repository of assets for
use in corporate communications, HR
training materials, business development,
operations and other departments. In
turn, each department started to store
their assets in the system. I began to
evangelise about the tool to different
departments by requesting time in staff
meetings, volunteering to present at
global meetings and conferences, and
pointing people to the tool whenever
they called or e-mailed me with a request.
I presented the benefits (not simply the
features) of the tool in every instance.
Benefits like cost and time savings were
very effective in selling the DAM to
different departments. I also asked
sceptical users what it would take to get
them to ‘buy in’, and delivered the
functionality as soon as possible.When the
tool was at a place of stability, I requested
that each brand place essential documents
and assets exclusively in the DAM to
drive users into the tool, because the
belief was that if we could get them into
the tool, they would see the many things
to which they have access.And it worked.
However, with the explosive growth
came tremendous growing pains.This new,
diverse set of users came with a mixed
assortment of very high demands, and I
soon realised that I had no ability to
influence their expectations.Their
expectations for unrestricted ability to
search, sort, browse, download, share and
track assets were created, not by their
department, Marriott or myself.They had
been created by Facebook,Apple, Flickr
and Google!
I was completely unprepared for the
onslaught.The complaints quickly filled
my e-mail and voicemail inbox, and I
could not walk the halls of the building
without being stopped by someone with a
very specific issue, need or frustration. I
knew that unless we launched the familiar
functionality and conveniences as are
expected and in a reasonable amount of
time, we would lose momentum and
support for the DAM and BrandWorks.
The programme was a crossroads.We
could either continue forward with a
relatively small, specialised DAM that met
the needs of the Field Marketing
Department, or develop a plan to become
a global, enterprise-wide DAM, which
could power many applications in the
company.We opted to develop a global
solution.
The first thing we had to do was to
define needs and specifications, but this
time we gathered feedback and suggestions
from a large number of departments,
organisations and individual users from
around the globe.We set up steering
committees and user forums, and invested
a great deal of effort to discern the
differences in the ways the different groups
worked and assigned responsibilities.We
also paid particular attention to cultural
differences.We gained keen insight by
analysing support logs and through user
forums and pilot groups, and we got a true
understanding of the users’‘pain points.’
We employed the use of online surveys
that were open to all users who had
registered for the tool. In short, we left no
stone unturned for fear of repeating the
mistake we made when we launched
BrandWorks initially.
The response was amazing. People took
ownership of the tool as their own and
took a vested interest in improving it. It
was overwhelming. Our user forums were
very lively and flush with great ideas.We
᭧ Henry Stewart Publications 2047-1300 (2012) Vol. 1, 1 000–000 Journal of Digital Media Management 5
Case study: The accidental asset manager
6. got a response rate of more than 50 per
cent on our formal survey.The responses
not only gave us quantitative results, but
also extremely valuable qualitative
responses, which varied from praise to
open hostility. Many people were very
frustrated with the lack of sophistication
of the system (thanks, Google!) and the
limited amount of content that was
available. But they were engaged, and that’s
what mattered most. People were starving
for a solution and were willing to take
ownership of their tool and to put in the
effort to make it work.
LESSONS LEARNED FROM AN
ACCIDENTAL ASSET MANAGER
Make it accessible
You cannot force your user base to adopt
a new tool, no matter how good it is.
Most people are resistant to change and
are certainly not going to search for a new
tool to use. Instead, the tool has to be easy
to find and easy to access. Communicate
about the tool in as many different forums
as you can — corporate e-mail lists,
conferences, presentations, intranet sites,
etc. If possible, offer at least some
components of the tool for free.At
Marriott, I was able to secure different
funding sources from brand managers and
various departments to provide the DAM
to our users at no additional charge to
their organisation.
Keep it simple
Users have high expectations of software
usability as they have grown accustomed
to extremely well-designed sites such as
Google, Facebook, and Flickr. Simplicity is
essential: cater to these expectations and
borrow similar features, terminology, and
look-and-feel.We have learned the hard
way that if a user cannot work out how to
do what they need quickly, they will not
use the tool at all.
Start small
Do not set out to create a full end-to-end
solution. By the time you launch the
application, the requirements will have
changed drastically.We found that Agile
software development practices helped us
to start small by breaking up work into
more manageable pieces and rolling out
incrementally (see section ‘DAM and
Agile:A Natural Fit’ below). Implement
the most important features first and
celebrate these small successes.This will
keep the DAM team motivated and will
keep your users engaged.
Be your own champion
When we first began creating the Marriott
DAM, departments were using their own
asset libraries in the form of databases,
space on intranet sites, or on the shared
network. In order to be successful across
the entire organisation, we had to gain
buy-in from many different departments
and key leadership. Use every opportunity
you can to present the DAM to key
individuals at various meetings and
conferences, or over a cup of coffee.When
presenting your DAM, focus on the
benefits of the tool; do not just spout off a
list of features.
Engage your users
Include all types of user groups in the
requirements-gathering process when
developing a DAM or enhancing it. Do
not just include corporate users or senior
level managers. In our case, we learned to
include users in all regions, across brands
from both managed properties and
franchised.We found that there are often
different business processes across the
organisation and these groups tend to use
the tool differently.You need to find a
solution that works for all. Users like to be
heard, and you will get the best feedback
from these people. Engage your users by
including them in pilot groups, surveys,
and live webinars and software
Brier
6 Journal of Digital Media Management Vol. 1, 1 000–000 ᭧ Henry Stewart Publications 2047-1300 (2012)
7. demonstrations. In the end, you will
deliver a product that your users have
asked for.
Look into the future
Do not just fix today’s problems. By
implementing each specific change
request, you will end up with an
inconsistent application with poor
navigation.Analyse the business reason
behind each change request. Be pro-active
and create a tool that can accommodate
future business needs — expect heavy
customisation, expect globalisation, keep
up with marketing trends (eg we never
anticipated animated banner ads would be
in high demand when we launched), and
build a database that can support these
needs.
In this process, we identified seven
distinct areas that turned out to be critical
in helping BrandWorks to evolve from its
original field-marketing focus, to become
a truly global, enterprise-wide digital asset
management solution.These areas
included:
1. Roles and permissions (Figure 3).At
Marriott, access to assets is governed by
three primary variables: (a) the brand
with which the property is associated,
with whom the user is associated; (b)
geographic region in which the
property (and presumably, the user) is
operating; and (c) the owner or
franchise management company that is
responsible for operating the hotel. In
addition, BrandWorks users are assigned
at the time of registration to one of
seven different user types in the
application, each with its own set of
capabilities, and responsibility for, digital
assets.This matrix of licensing rights
and operational authority spans more
than six dozen unique user experiences
in the system, and is vital in ensuring
that Marriott, as a global enterprise,
exercises proper control over the digital
assets it has procured and/or licensed,
while at the same time giving more
than 14,000 unique users the capability
to get their jobs done easily and
efficiently, day in and day out.
2. Taxonomy and metadata (Figure 4).
When we first launched BrandWorks,
we thought it would be sufficient to
give asset owners the ability to tag their
images and documents with keywords
of their own choosing.What we luckily
discovered, however, was that to make
᭧ Henry Stewart Publications 2047-1300 (2012) Vol. 1, 1 000–000 Journal of Digital Media Management 7
Case study: The accidental asset manager
Figure 3: Roles and permissions allow and restrict access to different content and assets
8. keyword search effective with our
image library (which today approaches
100,000 images), we had to encourage
users to collaborate with us on the
development of brand- and
industry-specific keyword vocabularies,
so that all assets would be tied in to at
least one keyword term that was
commonly used across the enterprise.
By combining this discipline with the
freedom to add as many tags as a user
might desire, we have dramatically
increased the average number of times
an asset is returned in search results, as
well as the number of times an asset is
downloaded, delivered or utilised in one
of the system’s dynamic document
generation wizards.
3. Rights management (intellectual
property) (Figure 5).At the time that
BrandWorks was conceived there was
serious concern about the potential
misuse of assets, outside their contracted
license/usage agreements.As it turns
out, this concern was well founded, as
our user community (like most, I
suspect) demonstrated only a
rudimentary understanding of the
seriousness of digital image rights —
along with a surprising level of
innovation in their efforts to
circumvent the protections that we
initially put in place.As an example, we
would find users logging in under one
brand to download a brand-licensed
image, and then logging in under a
separate brand (sometimes in a
completely different geographic region),
and uploading the image as a
property-specific asset, so that it could
be used in an entirely different (and
potentially unlicensed) manner.
Motivated by the clear enthusiasm for
the system — as well as our legal
department’s uncompromising direction
— we developed a broad range of
additional safeguards that have helped us
to take image rights management to a
whole new level.We built in an
automatic image-identifier, which is
applied to images when first uploaded
to the system, that prevents the image
from being re-uploaded in any other
form or region.We instituted a
Brier
8 Journal of Digital Media Management Vol. 1, 1 000–000 ᭧ Henry Stewart Publications 2047-1300 (2012)
Figure 4: Metadata and tagging helps deliver richer search results
9. requirement that image uploaders
provide rights-management
documentation at the time of upload,
and integrated into the system a
pre-existing rights-management
approval process.And, we automatically
sunset images once they have reached
the licence expiration date captured
upon upload, including all documents
(ads, brochures, etc) that contain those
assets.This guards against users
reordering documents that contain
expired images.
Together, these features have helped
us to instil a revitalised appreciation of,
and respect for, the complexities
associated with rights management,
helping us both to adhere to, and in
some cases actually define, best practices
in this critically important area.
4. Document integration (Figures 6 and
7).The original AdWorks was conceived
as an ad-building tool.Today, that
fundamental purpose remains a strong
focus.The DAM that sits at the heart of
BrandWorks is connected directly into
the document generation wizards, with
a set of transformation and
image-editing tools that help users to
make the best possible use of their
images and assets, while maintaining
strict adherence to brand guidelines.
One example of this is the visual
cropping tools that we put in place, so
that users could insert property specific
photography into ads and brochures
quickly and easily. Borrowing from
some of the interface conventions made
popular by sites like Flickr and
Facebook, we have increased the use of
property specific photography in print
advertising by more than 1,000 per cent
since the inception of AdWorks back in
2004.
Another example of our focus on
brand standards is the unique lightbox
feature in BrandWorks. Like many other
systems, the lightbox allows users to
provide printers, publications, and
agency partners with secure access to
assets through a time-limited link. But
the BrandWorks lightbox goes one step
further, by automatically delivering
within the lightbox the brand-standards
and guidelines and usage rights
associated with the type(s) of asset the
user has placed in the lightbox. By
going this extra mile, we send a message
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Case study: The accidental asset manager
Figure 5: Usage rights assignment process built into the system
10. both to our field marketers and their
partners about the vital importance of
brand integrity and consistency.
5. Asset consolidation. Over the course
of 18 months, we consolidated seven
separate asset management systems from
around the globe into the centralised
DAM, ingesting more than 10,000 assets
and training thousands of users on the
system interface and business processes.
By using our geographic, brand, and
property-level parameters we were able
to create ‘walled gardens’, so that each
user community could retain its
individual identity. But at the same
time, we integrated their efforts and
assets into the larger whole, making
both their capabilities, and the system as
a whole, stronger as a result.
6. Tracking and reporting (Figures 8
and 9). In the early days of AdWorks,
the focus was on executing
functionality, and reporting on usage
took a back-seat to the daily efforts to
get advertising campaigns out of the
door. But as the project matured, it
became increasingly apparent that
senior-level support for the system
demanded a robust reporting module.
To meet that need, we built in a
real-time reporting dashboard that
allows us to generate dozens of
graphically rich, data-intensive reports
on the user community, usage patterns,
asset-re-use, and other statistics that help
to make plain the return on investment
that the system is producing.
7. Application integration. Once
BrandWorks had achieved critical mass
with field-marketing users across all
brands and in all regions, I began to get
requests from other departments for
access to some of the assets that it
houses.At first, we handled these
Brier
10 Journal of Digital Media Management Vol. 1, 1 000–000 ᭧ Henry Stewart Publications 2047-1300 (2012)
Figure 6: Using assets in the development of customised marketing materials
Figure 7: Built-in sharing capability with audit trail
11. requests on a one-off basis, but it soon
became obvious that the sheer volume
and complexity demanded a more
robust solution. It was apparent that we
needed to re-engineer the DAM from
an integrated solution that was coded
into BrandWorks, to a complete
standalone application with easy and yet
robust uploading, sharing and
downloading capabilities.We also
discovered that in order to further
solidify the DAM as the recognised and
accepted centralised, enterprise-wide
DAM, we needed to make it much
easier for people to access assets directly,
but also make it easy for other
applications to tap into the DAM.To
meet the need, about eight months ago
we began a project to open up the
BrandWorks DAM through an
Application Programming Interface
(API) to other Marriott applications —
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Case study: The accidental asset manager
Figure 8: Individual asset audit trail and tracking
Figure 9: User adoption and activity
12. from sales to corporate
communications, to operations and
beyond. Code-named ‘AssetLocker’, and
championed by our development team
at Pica9, the project is now feeding
assets into — and accepting uploads
from — two other distinct applications,
with several others now on our
planning horizon.This is done by
providing a Web Service Definition
Language (WSDL) file to the
application administrator during the
implementation, which allows other
applications to access the DAM using
standard web protocol.The
documentation is also provided that
references the core methods that will be
exposed in the SOAP (a simple
XML-based protocol to let applications
exchange information), and is described
in the WSDL.The services described
take standard values (string, bool, int,
etc) to eliminate or reduce the number
of cross-platform issues.
This integration of the DAM into other
applications expands the value of the assets
in the system by making them usable and
available for use in many more functions,
while at the same time strengthening and
growing the DAM with new assets and
users. Over time, we believe that we will
see other digital image libraries fold into
BrandWorks as we work to create a single
enterprise repository that is highly secure
where it needs to be, and yet open and
capable of supporting Marriott’s rapidly
evolving needs.
DAM AND AGILE: A NATURAL FIT
Over the past four years, the team
responsible for building and evolving
BrandWorks and the Marriott DAM has
grown and matured as much as the
application has.When we first began, we
sought to follow the Agile (Scrum) project
management methodology that the
Marriott Information Resources team has
championed throughout the enterprise.
With a focus on delivering value in small,
demonstrable increments, and a
commitment to learning from the user
community, the Scrum method has proved
to be incredibly important to our success
given the collaborative culture that exists
at Marriott.Although we started by
listening to our users and documenting
their requirements, we knew that no
discovery process would be able to give us
a comprehensive understanding of what
our application would ultimately have to
be and do.And so, we established three
guiding principles:
1. Be open to feedback and suggestions.
2. Be flexible; don’t let the technology
dictate decisions.
3. Be compliant to Marriott Information
Resources (IT) guidelines; don’t be a
maverick.
Today, the BrandWorks team — which
encompasses both our technology partner
Pica9 and our project management firm
Excella — has developed what I can only
call a highly-productive rhythm in its
operations, which allows us to respond to
new requests and initiatives with an
extremely high level of efficiency and
responsiveness.We conduct daily huddles
to make sure that all of our different
projects are proceeding without obstacle.
We release new features on a disciplined
weekly cycle that demonstrates to our user
community our commitment to keeping
the application in synch with their
evolving needs.And in our monthly
planning sessions, we look long and hard
at the impact of new features on usage,
and at our own productivity as a team —
committed to the belief that accountability
is the surest way to foster continuing
improvement.
And so it is that I became an Accidental
Digital Asset Manager. I suspect that many
Brier
12 Journal of Digital Media Management Vol. 1, 1 000–000 ᭧ Henry Stewart Publications 2047-1300 (2012)
13. others have either happened upon their
new career direction in much the same way
as I have, or they are unknowingly in the
process of becoming a digital asset manager.
In either case, it is a wonderful position to
hold.This role has introduced me to so
many more aspects of my company and our
business than I could have ever seen had I
stayed in my narrowly-defined role. For
better or for worse, I am known as the
person who created this behemoth.And I
am better for it.
᭧ Henry Stewart Publications 2047-1300 (2012) Vol. 1, 1 000–000 Journal of Digital Media Management 13
Case study: The accidental asset manager