Lisa Grimm: Hello, and welcome to Practical DAM, the podcast that is a companion to practical digital asset management, a guide for students and practitioners, which my lovely co-author, Ms. Elizabeth Keathley, is holding up for those who are watching on a video platform. Hello.
E Keathley: Hey.
Lisa Grimm: And we are super excited today to be joined by Celine Millender, who is a longtime friend of myself, has finally gotten introduced to Elizabeth. But we're gonna be chatting, as we always do, a little bit about careers, how we've all got into this strange space. But today we're also gonna focus specifically on workflows within DAM and workflows across ecosystems, you know, pros, cons, but but really I would say governance of workflows is a big thing we might get into because Lord knows this can get very messy. But Celine, welcome, how are you?
Celine Millinder: Hi Lisa, hi Elizabeth, lovely to be here and I'm very well, thank you.
Lisa Grimm: wonderful. And we are thrilled to be talking workflows, workflow governance, workflow maturity. So we will certainly dive into all of that. But before we do, we'll chat a little bit as as we say about how we all got here. So again, as our special guest, we'll we'll start with you. Tell us a little bit about how your career has led you into where you are now with DAM and with the kind of broader sort of content operations field and anything you wanna kind of give people a little breadcrumb to find their way into this strange place.
Celine Millinder: Absolutely. I mean how did I end up here? I have no idea. I guess it started off
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
Celine Millinder: with photography. So I was very much a creative and then really developed an interest in metadata and really fell into the agency side of the work and then somehow ended up in the museum world, more in the image licensing aspect. But really I was working within the commercial team and so very much working alongside your product, your franchises and your publishing teams, which was extremely exciting and an eye-opening on how many in many ways you could use assets, especially in a museum. The other part of the job that was incredibly interesting was working with the collections teams and really delving into that world as well. So basically it really opened the dam sphere to me and realizing how broad it was and how interesting it was, to me at least, maybe not to everyone. And and then in that was my my first path or my first museum was the VA. And then I was lucky enough to move on to the Louvre Abu Dhabi. which was at the time newly opened, very much operational, but everything was still being developed, processes, and I was very lucky to come at a time where everything was being built from scratch. And one of those operational sides was the digital asset management piece. So really everything was scattered around, no one knew where it was, and and so that was a great place for me to start and really kind of gather all of that. you could say Intel and and see how we could get everyone working together and and build the digital digital asset management from scratch. So and that that was really quite a lucky strike for me. And then yes, back in the UK I moved into the charity sphere. So there I worked with Save the Children. Again an incredible experience there really seeing how assets could be truly impactful stories stories of real people, real life stories. and most of all children. And and that was another you know again seeing it in another industry, seeing how assets are so valuable in another way was incredibly fascinating to me. especially from an ethical point of view, you could say. That was the new aspect that really opened up in in in in say the children. And then and then I joined ICP, which is where I am now. I've been with them for a year. so I did forget to mention that I was digital asset manager and product owner at say the children, which gave me a really big breadth of of of experience, you know, working internally within a company, which was incredibly beneficial working across, you know, with other teams and specialists, and now working at ICP, it's been another new sort of should we say another chapter for me where I'm working with more commercial customers, where there's much more of a commercial side to the digital assets. And so that's also incredibly fascinating, seeing that and also the wider ecosystems, seeing, you know, the other systems that feed off of the dam or feed into the dam. so
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Celine Millinder: PIM or the wider Yeah, that wider ecosystem. So that's been incredibly yeah, i an incredible experience. And I would say, for anyone out there looking to go into digital asset management, I think you know, clearly I hadn't set to come at this point.
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha.
Celine Millinder: I didn't know I would be here. So I would say
Lisa Grimm: Very frequently the the story. Yeah.
Celine Millinder: Yeah, I think as long as there's that interest and curiosity, who knows where the path will lead.
Lisa Grimm: Yes, absolutely. And I love that you you kind of got in here, you know, not only but but partially just by geeking out on the metadata part, because I think that's such a commonality for for folks. Even if you don't come from a sort of, you know, sort of library background or archives background, like you said, if you're c coming from a more creative one, you suddenly recognize that power of metadata and how this opens up all of these new worlds or or potentially helps you keep some guardrails as as well, which I think we'll certainly come onto a little bit. Talking about kind of workflows and how how important the metadata is in powering those workflows, or what it looks like when it's not there, and it can be extremely messy indeed. But I did want to come on briefly to some of your points around kind of the museum part of the part of your career, because I think people really underestimate how difficult it is to get some collections management and DAM and CMS and anything across that ecosystem to talk to one another. There's more solutions out there. there now that are a bit friendlier and you know kind of like to play nicely together, but that doesn't mean your typical museum has all of those. Like I I wonder if you wanted to speak a little bit about just some of those challenges in the kind of interoperability if you like.
Celine Millinder: Absolutely. I think it's that interoperability, but also the different needs and and and wants of those different teams. And it's sort of how do you marry those together without losing that important information? So, you know, there is a big debate around whether or not you need a collection management system
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm.
Celine Millinder: and a dam. That can be another conversation in its own. For me, maybe the the question is more, you know, what is it that you need it to do? And maybe you do need that CMS. alongside the the content management system and your dam, maybe there is a reason for for those three systems to coexist. I think it's very different now when you talk about companies managing
Lisa Grimm: Hm.
Celine Millinder: their objects versus a museum. Now I would say can you compare both? Can you compare the size of the collections? You know, the VNA accounts for two million objects. I could be wrong,
Lisa Grimm: Gosh, yeah.
Celine Millinder: so I don't want to be held but you know you're talking about huge amounts of collections and years of historical data. now would a dam be able to manage that as well as another system? who you know that that's a big question and coming back to the interoperability I agree I think it's a huge when you look at what the museums do I I feel that at times they are quite ahead with the the way that they're very innovative in the way that they you know use their digital assets and have systems that are connected but it's not to say that it is something that's very it's very expensive because each system needs to be managed and And luckily for I think what does favor museums is that the for them the most valuable items are their collection and that collection only lives through its digital version. And so I'm not I shouldn't say it only lives, but it does live now with the digital, you know, world, with the web and everything, that is its best place to be visited and ex accessed by more people. So you do see there's an incentive and there is value in having teams managing those and managing that metadata and making sure that it's up to date and accurate. so I I think sorry, I'm going totally down another a little
Lisa Grimm: No, it's it's one of our favorite rabbin holes. Yeah.
E Keathley: Well, yeah,
Celine Millinder: Yeah.
E Keathley: no, I I think that one of the reasons that museums have gotten so ahead in the digital asset management game is that their insurers are increasingly requiring this extensive documentation to guarantee the collection. And you know, if you have to come together for all that insurance like core business reason of being, the institution is going to invest more both with people and money into the system. and I've just loved seeing this area of digital asset management grow. For a while it was a little bit behind because museums don't always have the money to invest in, you know, what is essentially an IT initiative. And I think in originally, you know, even just ten years ago, there were a lot of people who are in museum management who weren't as tech forward perhaps as one would hope. Because that's not what they studied. They studied museums. They were classical scholars of some stripe or another and really thought of, you know, IT as this thing that doesn't wasn't necessarily critical to museum operations in the way that, you know, we do. But obviously, as things have come along, you know, there's been a generational shift in that thinking. But I do think that a lot of it was pushed by the insurance industry onto museums. Celine, am I right? Am I wrong? Am I missing the mark here?
Celine Millinder: I suppose that's a really good point. I'd never really thought about it that way, but it's true that the whole point of a collection management system is that you're supposed to be able to have the object like it has to be registered from the moment it enters your collection
Lisa Grimm: Hm.
E Keathley: Sure. Yeah.
Celine Millinder: to the moment it leaves. It has to have everything needs to be documented. And that goes for loaned objects, for anything so when it undergoes any sort of like renovation or that's documented in it so yes there is that part of the CMS that it yeah the role it plays and that's true I'd never really thought of of the insurance bit.
E Keathley: Well yeah, I've I had a lot of very intense discussions. over twenty years ago I was working on a grant with the National Endowment for the humanities for the NEH and I was a preservation services officer, which meant I was helping institutions, cultural institutions get grants and things like that. And I was trying to move institutions into just even having a digital inventory and I had There were people who were just insistent that no, our museum register is a book. The book is written with this kind of pen.
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
E Keathley: The book is stored in this kind of place. Computer files go away. That's not preservation. And I like I would just have to sit there and listen. I would be like, okay, okay, can I scan it? And sometimes scanning it was gonna be the the best way forward. And of course the change in that was really Hurricane Katrina because it wipes so many places in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama. just so completely off the map and anything that wasn't digitized was just gone. And I still I I have some inner grief and I know a lot of other people from my region still do for things that were just lost because if it wasn't digitized before Katrina hit, it's gone from a lot of those collections. you know, what remains is still incredible, you know, but whenever I encounter people in the cultural institution world who are still on that no digit digitization isn't preservation tack. all I have to do is talk about Katrina and the the argument stops. And then of course after that, that was when the insurance companies really leaned in because the losses were so profound twenty years
Celine Millinder: Mm.
E Keathley: ago from Katrina. They were like, no, cultural institutions need to move into digital asset management. We can't guarantee you guys anything unless you can show us everything backed up elsewhere.
Celine Millinder: Wow.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, I hadn't even thought about that. And then of course, a as you say, that in itself is not preservation, that's the beginning of
E Keathley: No, yeah.
Lisa Grimm: part of a preservation plan, which is something we can we'll probably revisit in a future episode, I think, because we can really dig into long term digital preservation and what that means and all that good stuff. But but I will be boring and and bring us back to workflows for a minute. So I think even before we dive into that, I think, you know, there's there's so many different ways you can look at it. You know, is is the workflow effectively just, you know, is this a business process that also exists in your dam? Is a workflow used as a kind of shorthand again for maybe just something That is done. Is a workflow something again that's maybe pre-canned or that you kind of modify? I think there's a lot of different ways you can slice it. So I think maybe we want to think about how we want to kind of define it here as in terms of like how do we see those workflows in the dam or potentially across the ecosystem? Because I think this is so important when you're either working with a consulting client or even in-house. A lot of people take this to mean different things. Celine, what have you Celine, what have you found that's kind of a good way to to level set for for people around this topic?
Celine Millinder: I think that that is you've given me the the trickiest part I think because I think that
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
Celine Millinder: is something that we encounter a lot, you know. I think people want to do workflows and I think the fact that now it's so easy to create workflows in a dam. well I'm talking about specifically in the dam. I'm not talking across different systems. That's another Topic in itself, because then you delve into the APIs and then the interoperability, which I always struggle to say. But but
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, same.
Celine Millinder: here the workflow in DAM, I find that it is a topic that's come up quite a lot recently as well, where you know people are very eager to do workflows. Let's do workflows, let's do workflows. You're right. You the the big question is: okay, but what do you mean by workflow? What what workflow do you want to create? And that workflow idea becomes this, you know, and I suppose one key thing for workflow, to me at least, is that it it should be an agreed path for moving
Lisa Grimm: Hmm.
Celine Millinder: an asset. and it's not just moving an asset, it's also the decisions that need to be made in that moving of the asset. And then, you know. what what do you want that to do? So what's your ultimate goal? And and I guess and all of those things should be defined in order to have, you know, an idea of what that workflow. And when I say agreed, it's because we all have a different idea for workflow. So y
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Celine Millinder: we all three could be in the same team and talking about the workflow, but we maybe have a different like concept of that. and I suppose one key thing is to remember that that has to be something that removes friction and should help people do something quicker or help automate something that is really like a task, a repetit repetitive task. without going any further because I might go a bit too
Lisa Grimm: No, I I think that's a great start because I always like to tell people, you know, never automate a bad process. You know, take the step back first and find out what is it you're trying to do, first of all, like like you said, but then also, is this what you want to automate? Or do you really want to kind of, you know, say, let's take an hour to kind of workshop this with the right people in the room or on the call or or whatever, and say, Okay, but is this is this what we want? Do we want to do it this way versus, well, we can turn the thing on? It's like, well, okay, but You know, does that sort of get us does that really like not move the needle? Did we just move the thing to a different place versus like you say, is it getting you some sort of achievable, you know, business outcome, whether that's doing something more quickly or with, you know, sort of less human intervention or taking out human error? But I think it I I I find where it's been really effective is when you've got time to sort of, you know, s tak you know, sort of sit you know, take that step back, but also have someone who does that sort of business process mapping and is drawing all the boxes and the the arrows and the decision points and you don't always have that Luxury, of course, but I think when you do have someone who can help plot those things out, it it makes a massive difference before you just kind of either go in yourself or go back to your dam vendor or your system integrator and say, let's turn on this workflow that does X. You know, let's let's figure out why we're doing it first and how we really want to do it. And sometimes people just want to turn the thing on and you have to kind of dig into w what are we
Celine Millinder: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: doing?
Celine Millinder: And and I often feel a as though maybe sometimes I feel maybe maybe I'm I'm a bit, you know, it must be frustrating for people, but like for me, recently I was thinking about this and maybe just wanna I wanna know what you think about this, but you know, I was thinking about it. And you know, the DAM in itself is a workflow tool, right? It's it's your life cycle, it's your asset lifecycle in one
Lisa Grimm: Mm.
Celine Millinder: place. And if that is not mature enough, if you haven't got it set up right, then no amount of workflow is gonna help you make anything easier. So I think there's also the other question of before and I guess everyone's at different maturity levels. So maybe someone is at a level where they can go, Yeah, let's just do a workflow and yep, I know the triggers, I know the you know We know the decisions that need to be made, the state changes, and we we know the outcome we want. Great. But I think for for many it's more actually, should we just first look at the foundations and look at, okay, what do we have all our ducks in a row? Is our metadata up to scratch? Is it already working for us before even thinking about workflow? Because you said it earlier on, that metadata will drive. your workflows. So your intentions should already be visible in your dam and that should help you then build your workflows. If that is sound, then there's very little work that needs to be done to build those workflows. I don't know what you think.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, no a hundred percent. Yeah, no Elizabeth, yeah, I'd love to like you I can see the wheels turning and you're you're having some thoughts there.
E Keathley: Yeah, I I mean I just my my least favorite damn consultant task is sometimes a workflow because sometimes what is happening, not all the time, but sometimes what is happening and my worst clients with this have all been video, is that there is actually an HR problem. There's an HR problem, somebody's not turning their files in, there's it's delaying other people's work and there's like and they've decided we're gonna have accountability now. We're gonna put in a workflow tool. We're gonna put in a digital asset management system. And then they call in the digital asset management consultant. Please come save us. Draw out our workflow with us. Okay, let's do it. And the true problem is an HR problem, and the HR problem is not gonna con is not going to they're not gonna cooperate with me. I'm not doing that. Okay, how do you expect me, your digital asset management consultant, To solve your company's HR problem. And I can
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
E Keathley: come back and say, Look, I am gonna build this workflow. And they're like, Well, you gotta make it so that Johnny turns in his stuff. I was like, That I can't do that. I can make it a dependency.
Celine Millinder: Yeah.
E Keathley: You have to make Johnny turn in his files in the right format on the right day. The the the system will not magically force Johnny to turn in his files correctly.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, a hundred percent and and just think about that, yeah.
E Keathley: Will build I will build the workflow that you ask me. I will build the workflow that you ask me. I agree. This system is needed here. You guys need a workflow. It's chaos. We're doing final, final, final all the way through. But I am not
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
E Keathley: your HR rep. Someone else fix this. And this when you find out whether or not the dam is really gonna work. Because if it's going to work, they're going to address the people problem while we're doing it. And if it's not gonna work, they're gonna be like, just set it up, just set it up and I'm gonna go and I know exactly what's gonna happen. Johnny's never gonna use that damn. He's decided he's not, you guys are not gonna fire him. You know, I don't I don't know what to tell you.
Celine Millinder: It it's so true. It's it's so true. But I have also seen the other scenario where there has been an impact to the business and then it wasn't Operational deciding this, it was the senior management that was going, no, we have to introduce something more robust, and we need everything to go through licensing, and therefore we need to build this workflow. And so when that happens, then you have that buy-in because there's no choice, because you're right. how it's not by it's not because you're creating it's it's so frustrating because you know that the workflow would make it easier but as soon as there's a decision or it has to go through that that you know different person for the the asset to move forward of that workflow to work then it really breaks down quite quickly because it it it's not just buy-in it's also well if the notification is an email and that person's off N do you have a you know a a system in place that it goes to someone else? Is there a backup? do you have in-system notifications? Do you have that yeah, those workflows are are definitely very tricky to to to pull off without that
E Keathley: Well
Celine Millinder: full buy-in.
E Keathley: Yeah, and you're talking about top down 'cause you said executives pushing it through 'cause there's been an inde there's been an impact to business. Top down versus bottom up adoption of the dam. It never works from bottom up. It only works from top down. You have to have someone at the top of the organization saying, No, we're gonna do this. You have to use it or we have a real problem. You know. I've I've never seen bottom up work, not once. It has to be
Celine Millinder: No.
E Keathley: top down. You have to have that understanding and buy in from the executives.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, e even with all the goodwill in the world. Yeah.
E Keathley: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. No
Celine Millinder: But
Lisa Grimm: a hundred percent. Yeah.
Celine Millinder: yeah, but then but then those automations, those workflows that are just automating tasks, those are easy, right? Because it's
E Keathley: Mm-hmm.
Celine Millinder: basically just automating a task. It could be useful for a damn admin or you know, there there's full ownership, but it's the ones where you need those decisions. that yeah. Much trickier.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And I think I think that's an important point too is is sort of seeing those that are kind of automations for the dam and the dam admin team who are just like, yes, I can turn this on and this is gonna make my life so much easier if I'm just getting like all the alt text automatically assigned or y you know, wha wh whatever s some of those things are, or I can, you know, set up all of these dates to, you know, sort of expire on the same day and I'll see, you know, X and Y happen. We we love those, but then like you say, when you get these that are much more sort of, you know, decision tree and if So and so is out, who does it go to next? And and and those are the ones where, you know, I've seen some really scary things happen. y you know, again, and like like you're both saying, just mostly through lack of governance, because if you didn't figure it out beforehand and then suddenly you're getting called because, well, I I I started it but so and so's out of town, you're like Well, okay, we tried to build this, but yeah, it you
Celine Millinder: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: you really have to kind of say this is why it's so important to document these and I'm I'm so glad that the project I'm working on now w that we've had a whole sort of sort of deliverable, if you like, to really document all of our policies and procedures and workflows. And I'm like, this is great, I've been given the time and space to do this, and so again I'm I'm getting you know geeking out over policy work. But again, it it's what underpins all of these things and lets us do the fun techie stuff. Because if you've got it written down, then you can go ahead and say, and then here's how it's gonna work. I have something to refer back to. You've got a playbook. And if anyone goes on holiday or changes jobs or anything, you know why that decision was made, you know why that particular workflow was created, or maybe you don't know exactly why it was created, but you can go back and figure it out from the the you know the the other context you've got. So I think that that part around kind of again the governance, the documentation, and just having policies around these things and having what I found is really useful is just kind of a a catalogue of the workflows you have set up because you know if you're in the dam that they exist and you can get to them, but to have it in kind of plain English saying, this is the workflow that pushes things to cold storage, this is the workflow that you know, tells someone that this this license is expiring, then, you know, other people can look at that too and understand what you're talking about. And and that helps I think with that buy-in as well.
E Keathley: Yeah, documentation is really key, especially if you are a contractor of any kind. I mean, it should be standard no matter what, right? But especially as a contractor,
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, everyone should do it. Yeah, yeah. But
E Keathley: not only because you know you're not gonna be there forever, right? That you're you have a predefined time and you're gonna go. Secondly, it gives you a solid deliverable that you can point to and say, like, you know that I did this work, but also here's your documentation of the thing that I did, you know. And third, honestly, as a billable item. so that when we're going over
Lisa Grimm: yeah, absolutely.
E Keathley: our deliverables, like what we're expected, what we're doing, what we're handing over at the end, that you can give them these things that you can point to digitally. But also, my clients really have always responded positively when I have actually just printed out a good old fashioned Visio representation of what we've done. Now
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
Celine Millinder: Yeah.
E Keathley: is it readable? Because Visio doesn't really print very well on
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: Eight and a half by eleven paper? No, it's not. That's not the point. It's a
Lisa Grimm: Hay
E Keathley: customer satisfaction thing that you do.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: You know, to be able to hand them this piece of paper and be like, I know this isn't really readable, but just so you know there is a file and this is what and then they they like it. It makes people happy. So yeah.
Lisa Grimm: very much so. Yeah, and I and I've just realized too, you know, because we're so in the weeds, we should probably take a step back for people who are newer to this, what are common workflows that that we've seen out there in in the field? Because again, if if you're new to DAM or if you're you're new to sort of setting one up right now There will be a lot that, you know, you'll be told, these are all available precanned, you'll wanna do X and Y. But what are some of those that maybe people might want to start with versus those where you might want to say, you know, these may require a little more research and planning and testing before we go into them?
Celine Millinder: Absolutely. I mean, yeah, again, it it it depends on the maturity of the dam and also how well it is adopted, I would say. yeah, but we've mentioned a few already. there you have your review and approvals. the easiest ones are your metadata enrichments, where again it facilitates the job of dam manager, it does ensure consistency. you have your rights and governance. So maybe you have, you know, assets that expire or they're automatically moved out, they're they're not no longer visible. the so there are a number, and then it depends on well, we j that's also life cycle, you could say. But then there's also distribution and publishing, which is probably more for that more mature level where you've got integrated systems.
Lisa Grimm: yeah.
E Keathley: My favorite workflow that I ever did will not apply to any other work environment other than the one I did it in. but I love talking about it because I'm still very proud of it. When I worked at the CDC, I did a workflow that covered one entire wall of a meeting room. And it took us gosh, I think six weeks of interviews to build the workflow because what we were doing was
Celine Millinder: Well.
E Keathley: mapping an existing workflow that they were trying to simplify. And this thing, again, printed out. Vizio printed out, covered the entire wall of a small meeting room. And the workflow
Lisa Grimm: Gosh.
E Keathley: was how do you get live syphilis samples
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha.
E Keathley: to make reference slides for the lab? I was this workflow was for the CDC STI LRRB, so sexually transmitted infection laboratory. research and reference branch. And one of the things that they did nationally, and this no longer exists, this has been dismantled.
Lisa Grimm: Sleep.
E Keathley: yeah, I know. is that in order to identify syphilis on a slide in a lab, labs at hospitals would get reference slides from the CDC so that you know what it looks like under your microscope. And so they were always producing reference slides and these have to be refreshed every couple of years. because the samples die off. not even every couple of years, I think it was quarterly, because the samples die off. and so they were producing a whole reference slide set of chlamydia, syphilis, everything else. and the they were growing syphilis and rabbits. you grow a lot of other things in monkeys. We had the monkey processes too, but the monkey processes were very, very well mapped because of all the rules around working with monkeys. But you grow you grow syphilis and rabbits. And so it just hadn't been as well mapped. and there were several hold ups in this workflow of people getting the asset through. yeah,
Lisa Grimm: Gosh, I bet.
E Keathley: I love that job, man. I'd do it again. And I'm still terrifically proud of that workflow. and we did get some of it simplified. And I was working with the group where they were trying to figure out how not to have to use live animals to grow this thing. I don't think it's been figured out yet. but it was an amazing workflow to get to to get to visualize with them. So
Celine Millinder: But you kind of started with something quite complex. You know, we were thinking more of the simple and where could you start? You've already gone to that like that, you know, wall for us.
E Keathley: Yeah
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: yeah. Because there's ethical concerns to go back to your work
Celine Millinder: Yeah.
E Keathley: with Save the Children. Like they're
Lisa Grimm: Definitely.
E Keathley: they're a huge like it goes out to an independent review board and then it comes back and then every single animal is accounted for with their entire health history. Like it was very intense. But it hadn't been in a workflow tool. It had been, you know, they had had a written procedure, but they didn't have a workflow and they didn't have a workflow tool. And that's part of what I was there to do. As part with a limb, which is a laboratory information management system, which is a a kind of dam. You never know where this work is gonna take you. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, which we keep telling people. That's the thing. We keep telling people there's all these other things that don't call themselves dams, but are really dams. I know there's a lot to
E Keathley: It's a damn.
Lisa Grimm: in kind of like the evidence management space as well, and certainly there's a lot of legal information tools that effectively are dams or also just putting this out there for the legal field would be better served in a dam versus some of the tools that are out there. So call us, we can we can help you, you know.
E Keathley: And some of the legal tools that have been developed have been developed in isolation in their field and they really need to cross pollinate with other digital asset management fields for simplification. And you wanna talk about consulting charges, man, legal firms, woo, there's a lot going on there.
Celine Millinder: But I think I'm 'cause I can't really help on the legal side, but I wanna come back to, you know, what you said. You said you built the workflow but you had all the interviews. So how many like y you said how long did you spend on the on interviewing the users?
E Keathley: I think it was so that entire workflow, it was a it was six weeks to build that workflow. And I was in a I was in a larger contract. the first contract was a year, the second contract within was two years, was there three years total? But within those contracts, I was budgeted to different depart departments for different specific tasks. So I know that the mapping of that workflow I can't remember if it was we're talking about ten years ago now. I it was either six or eight weeks a a block for that department where they said come in and map this workflow and then we're going to implement the workflow in the limb, which was the bigger, you know, contract I had was with the limb. how many how many interviews? At least a month of talking to people, because I had to track people down because they had a written procedure that was a word dot. That said these
Celine Millinder: Mm-hmm.
E Keathley: are the steps that we go through. But of course that that was outdated. People had changed jobs. People had moved around. They were like, you know, Sally used to do that, but she retired and sometimes now we send it to Jane and so yeah, making up names. Sometimes now we send it to Jane and sometimes now we send it to Nikia, whatever. so I had to go through and remap, you know,
Celine Millinder: Mm.
E Keathley: off of this outdated Word document what the process actually was. And everybody knew this was a problem. It wasn't contentious in any way. They knew I was there to fix it, you know.
Celine Millinder: But I think I think
E Keathley: yeah.
Celine Millinder: that's such a great point because I think now again, coming back to the fact that it's so easy to build certain workflows that you know, you can go in and get quite trigger happy and just go and like build it. But
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Celine Millinder: actually there's all
E Keathley: No.
Celine Millinder: of that there's that whole process of like documenting it, but but using Visio I find really helpful because it really shows you the decision making points. Or the triggers, or you
E Keathley: Exactly.
Celine Millinder: know, w when are you uploading data? When is data being handled? All of those are super important to really be able to visualize what you're trying to build alongside building it in the platform. But there's that process of iteration, right? And and constantly kind of testing it with the users and then going back, tweaking it. But all of those are quite important to be able to
E Keathley: Well
Celine Millinder: build one that's actually effective.
E Keathley: And everyone has had some exposure, even if it's on just a high school level here in the United States, to what a computer workflow looked like in the eighties. Those basic shapes, there's still an ISO for those. If you go out, it helps just explain to people what you're doing. And if I came in and said, I'm gonna build a workflow in a limb, you know, and I used all the language about metadata and handoffs and all of those things, I would lose a lot of people. But if I throw up a visio chart
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, yeah.
E Keathley: and say, We're gonna map this out, it people automatically recognize the shapes. They know what that is. They've had even if they don't have business school, even if they've only, you know, if their background is straight up just like medical lab like they know what that is. It's not
Celine Millinder: Mm-hmm.
E Keathley: a mystery. It's not a surprise. even if they don't remember what the shapes mean, they're like, yes, this is a yes no. This is a you know, it it does a lot of the work for you automatically, just explaining why you're there and what you're trying to do. And of course when we're building buy in, to a workflow that's gonna be successful, that's really critical.
Celine Millinder: Yeah. And
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Celine Millinder: and I guess there's also the the other question of, you know, you said sorry, I'm just going straight into because before I forget my but you mentioned documentation and and I agree with you that that that's so important, especially as sometimes the workflows are interdependent. So you you'll
Lisa Grimm: Yes.
Celine Millinder: You know, as you build more workflows, you know, you're you're you're gaining traction. That that's great, but you can lose sight of what you actually already have existing. So coming back to what you said, Lisa, earlier on, which is you really need to label them correctly, take time to make sure that you've actually created them properly, not you know, quickly without actually adding titles. But then it's also understanding the interdependence so that we when something goes wrong. You know where to look. That that that's a challenge.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah. And and and I think to have that the right level of detail too, and I know we're not gonna talk too much about the workflows that cross different platforms because that's a whole bigger complicated issue, but even I'm working on something like that right now, but just to know which Which platform is the system of record for which bit of metadata, just just that piece,
E Keathley: Okay.
Lisa Grimm: is going to solve so many problems for you. So know what's coming from your dam, what's coming from your PIM, or again, could be CMS, could be another integrated system, but just that documentation will get, you know, I won't say it will solve all of your problems, but it will really help you be much clearer if something does go wrong. You can trace back to to where it happened. So do do that up front, folks. It's it's gonna just save you time and and lots of heartache later.
E Keathley: And I think also just to hammer home, it's not just the fact that the workflow works at the end of the day. It's not just the fact that you can demo on the dam like this is how we're gonna go through. It's having a deliverable for the people who are cutting you a check at the end of the day. They may not be the ones actually using the workflow, but the people who pay you are going to want to have something in their hand. Even if it's just the written out step by step, you know, any anything that you can hand them is gonna make them happier.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, no, a hundred percent. And and I I think one more piece on on just kind of the if we like how people sometimes get sort of lured into overusing workflows sometimes. I think, you know, when they're in that sort of buying process, like you say, the people who are using the dam or equivalent system are not necessarily the ones who are there in those initial demos. They're not the w there
E Keathley: Paying for it. Mm-hmm.
Lisa Grimm: seeing the sales folks. And again We have lots of damn vendor friends we love, we've got lots of sales friends we love, but sometimes people get excited by the bells and whistles of, ooh, you can do a workflow for this, you can do a workflow for that, but they're not the people ultimately using these tools often at the end of the day. So sometimes then the team running it is there's this real disconnect. So you have to think about, well, were they sold on kind of this promise of the workflows, w which again, in you know, in some cases can mean almost nothing. And and then in others it's massively important. But I I think that's often I'll I'll say more often than it should be kind of what made a particular buying decision go the way it did is because a particular demo that showed a particular automation was a real wow factor to someone, but maybe not the person using it. So I wonder I I feel like we've all been in that situation where then you have to come in and be like, okay That was cool, but w when are we going to use it and how do we sometimes have to square that circle of there is an expectation, like you're saying, for those people up above, they still want something delivered, but is it right for the, you know, right for the team using it? Is it something you're like, we're gonna put it in the roadmap? You know, sometimes it's a very political decision. I'm curious how you how you both navigate some of these things.
Celine Millinder: Yeah, I mean it's that's a difficult one because obviously to your point Elizabeth sometimes you're you're hired to do something and so you have to deliver on it. I think often what what I find is a struggle is defining that workflow. So there's
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm.
Celine Millinder: an idea of a workflow and you're right. Who decided on that is unclear. but there there is that, yes, we must have a workflow and but it's not yet defined or that that's where it gets tricky. So it's managing those expectations and that's that's the tricky bit I would say, because like you say, a lot of people have like, yeah, well let's let's do it, let's build it. It'll it'll okay, but w what are you trying to do? What are you trying to solve? Yeah, which is tricky.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. I I feel like we if we all can just, you know, have a sort of mantra, you know, at least once a day, what are we trying to solve? Just get everyone back on the same page. It it would y you know Yeah.
Celine Millinder: But it's it's so easily done because sometimes you just have to you know you have to deliver on something. You're under pressure, you've got
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Celine Millinder: a set budget, a set time frame to deliver on something, and you're supposed to solve something, you've seen something that works in a platform, you know, you everyone's buying in, great, okay, on the idea, and then there's the delivery, and the delivery is often like a little bit more tricky.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Celine Millinder: but Again, I think now there is such you know, there is that capability in DAM. So I guess the the how is less of an issue, like the you know, the the the functionality. it really is about the execution and making sure that it's thought through properly rather than just throwing in something that's you know, not necessarily gonna deliver. You know, it could be over engineered or it could even be that a workflow is not the solution for that particular problem. You know, often I do say let's let's look at the use case, let's let's look at what it is, and then let's have a look at what do we have out of the box before even going further. So you're right, maybe that has to should be done earlier on in the process. but not
Lisa Grimm: But not always possible.
Celine Millinder: always possible.
Lisa Grimm: good good. So I think we'll we'll we'll begin to wrap it up 'cause I I think we We w we like to sk you know keep saying the same things, but like please, you know, again, consult people who know what it is you're you're trying to do or who have a vision, you know, and then we can, you know, help you get to to where you want to be. But I think if we have to give people maybe one sort of, you know, useful parting tip, and it can be something we've said already, but what would if we have to kind of give one, I'll I'll let you each kind of share one, then I'll come back to mine. But and it's okay if we all end up on the same one, 'cause maybe we're just really passionate about it. But making workflows work, what's what's the one thing you want people to take away?
E Keathley: It has to be a top down management required process to some degree. People are not going to use the workflows unless management says they have to use the workflows.
Lisa Grimm: Very good.
Celine Millinder: Yep. I would say it's not so much the question shouldn't be how much can we automate? Should this be a workflow at all?
Lisa Grimm: very good. Love that.
Celine Millinder: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Love that. And and I will keep coming back to probably this you know, the same thing with a slightly different slant, you know, let's not automate a bad process, let's look at it first, make sure it's something that makes sense. And 'cause, you know, I I like to tell people, w whether they're clients or whether I'm in house somewhere, you know, that the job of, you know the the whole reason we have a dam here is to hopefully make everyone's lives easier. So if it's adding complexity, maybe there's a reason to do that in the short term. But in the long term, what can we do to sort of make it so that you don't have to think about these things? So again Let's make sure it's the right process, you know, the right people doing the right things, and you know, eventually i it will get easier. There may be a learning curve at first, but then you know, we'll get there. So it's all on the roadmap. There we go. there I said it too. It's all on the roadmap. It's like I work for a vendor again.
Celine Millinder: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: So well they well we'll we'll go ahead and leave it there, but again I would say folks who are listening, thank you so much for listening. Go ahead and do the likes, subscribes, all of those things. It does help other people find us. Some of you are beginning to do that. Elizabeth is again showing folks the book. It's it's lovely in its sort of black and blue and pinkish. I I'm not even sure how pink or purple it really is, because I haven't seen it yet, as I will continue to say.
E Keathley: Well, you know, the colors on this cover, when we were writing, this was my hair color and this was your hair color. We were not like shifting around a little bit.
Lisa Grimm: That's true, it was pretty close. Yeah. So there you go, folks. Behind the behind the music there, you know, all about hair colours. So thank you, but thank you, Celine. We will catch up again in person soon. We will either be in London or Paris together in the not too distant future. Probably both, you know. Why not both?
Celine Millinder: I hope so. I hope sooner than later. And Elizabeth as well. Hopefully, what if you ever come over in Europe, I would love to see you as well.
E Keathley: love to go back.
Lisa Grimm: Here, here.
E Keathley: I'll let you know when I'm there.
Celine Millinder: Please do.
Lisa Grimm: brilliant. So with that, thank you folks. We'll see you again. Goodbye.
Celine Millinder: Thanks all. Bye.
E Keathley: Hey.
Lisa Grimm: And we are super excited today to be joined by Celine Millender, who is a longtime friend of myself, has finally gotten introduced to Elizabeth. But we're gonna be chatting, as we always do, a little bit about careers, how we've all got into this strange space. But today we're also gonna focus specifically on workflows within DAM and workflows across ecosystems, you know, pros, cons, but but really I would say governance of workflows is a big thing we might get into because Lord knows this can get very messy. But Celine, welcome, how are you?
Celine Millinder: Hi Lisa, hi Elizabeth, lovely to be here and I'm very well, thank you.
Lisa Grimm: wonderful. And we are thrilled to be talking workflows, workflow governance, workflow maturity. So we will certainly dive into all of that. But before we do, we'll chat a little bit as as we say about how we all got here. So again, as our special guest, we'll we'll start with you. Tell us a little bit about how your career has led you into where you are now with DAM and with the kind of broader sort of content operations field and anything you wanna kind of give people a little breadcrumb to find their way into this strange place.
Celine Millinder: Absolutely. I mean how did I end up here? I have no idea. I guess it started off
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
Celine Millinder: with photography. So I was very much a creative and then really developed an interest in metadata and really fell into the agency side of the work and then somehow ended up in the museum world, more in the image licensing aspect. But really I was working within the commercial team and so very much working alongside your product, your franchises and your publishing teams, which was extremely exciting and an eye-opening on how many in many ways you could use assets, especially in a museum. The other part of the job that was incredibly interesting was working with the collections teams and really delving into that world as well. So basically it really opened the dam sphere to me and realizing how broad it was and how interesting it was, to me at least, maybe not to everyone. And and then in that was my my first path or my first museum was the VA. And then I was lucky enough to move on to the Louvre Abu Dhabi. which was at the time newly opened, very much operational, but everything was still being developed, processes, and I was very lucky to come at a time where everything was being built from scratch. And one of those operational sides was the digital asset management piece. So really everything was scattered around, no one knew where it was, and and so that was a great place for me to start and really kind of gather all of that. you could say Intel and and see how we could get everyone working together and and build the digital digital asset management from scratch. So and that that was really quite a lucky strike for me. And then yes, back in the UK I moved into the charity sphere. So there I worked with Save the Children. Again an incredible experience there really seeing how assets could be truly impactful stories stories of real people, real life stories. and most of all children. And and that was another you know again seeing it in another industry, seeing how assets are so valuable in another way was incredibly fascinating to me. especially from an ethical point of view, you could say. That was the new aspect that really opened up in in in in say the children. And then and then I joined ICP, which is where I am now. I've been with them for a year. so I did forget to mention that I was digital asset manager and product owner at say the children, which gave me a really big breadth of of of experience, you know, working internally within a company, which was incredibly beneficial working across, you know, with other teams and specialists, and now working at ICP, it's been another new sort of should we say another chapter for me where I'm working with more commercial customers, where there's much more of a commercial side to the digital assets. And so that's also incredibly fascinating, seeing that and also the wider ecosystems, seeing, you know, the other systems that feed off of the dam or feed into the dam. so
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Celine Millinder: PIM or the wider Yeah, that wider ecosystem. So that's been incredibly yeah, i an incredible experience. And I would say, for anyone out there looking to go into digital asset management, I think you know, clearly I hadn't set to come at this point.
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha.
Celine Millinder: I didn't know I would be here. So I would say
Lisa Grimm: Very frequently the the story. Yeah.
Celine Millinder: Yeah, I think as long as there's that interest and curiosity, who knows where the path will lead.
Lisa Grimm: Yes, absolutely. And I love that you you kind of got in here, you know, not only but but partially just by geeking out on the metadata part, because I think that's such a commonality for for folks. Even if you don't come from a sort of, you know, sort of library background or archives background, like you said, if you're c coming from a more creative one, you suddenly recognize that power of metadata and how this opens up all of these new worlds or or potentially helps you keep some guardrails as as well, which I think we'll certainly come onto a little bit. Talking about kind of workflows and how how important the metadata is in powering those workflows, or what it looks like when it's not there, and it can be extremely messy indeed. But I did want to come on briefly to some of your points around kind of the museum part of the part of your career, because I think people really underestimate how difficult it is to get some collections management and DAM and CMS and anything across that ecosystem to talk to one another. There's more solutions out there. there now that are a bit friendlier and you know kind of like to play nicely together, but that doesn't mean your typical museum has all of those. Like I I wonder if you wanted to speak a little bit about just some of those challenges in the kind of interoperability if you like.
Celine Millinder: Absolutely. I think it's that interoperability, but also the different needs and and and wants of those different teams. And it's sort of how do you marry those together without losing that important information? So, you know, there is a big debate around whether or not you need a collection management system
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm.
Celine Millinder: and a dam. That can be another conversation in its own. For me, maybe the the question is more, you know, what is it that you need it to do? And maybe you do need that CMS. alongside the the content management system and your dam, maybe there is a reason for for those three systems to coexist. I think it's very different now when you talk about companies managing
Lisa Grimm: Hm.
Celine Millinder: their objects versus a museum. Now I would say can you compare both? Can you compare the size of the collections? You know, the VNA accounts for two million objects. I could be wrong,
Lisa Grimm: Gosh, yeah.
Celine Millinder: so I don't want to be held but you know you're talking about huge amounts of collections and years of historical data. now would a dam be able to manage that as well as another system? who you know that that's a big question and coming back to the interoperability I agree I think it's a huge when you look at what the museums do I I feel that at times they are quite ahead with the the way that they're very innovative in the way that they you know use their digital assets and have systems that are connected but it's not to say that it is something that's very it's very expensive because each system needs to be managed and And luckily for I think what does favor museums is that the for them the most valuable items are their collection and that collection only lives through its digital version. And so I'm not I shouldn't say it only lives, but it does live now with the digital, you know, world, with the web and everything, that is its best place to be visited and ex accessed by more people. So you do see there's an incentive and there is value in having teams managing those and managing that metadata and making sure that it's up to date and accurate. so I I think sorry, I'm going totally down another a little
Lisa Grimm: No, it's it's one of our favorite rabbin holes. Yeah.
E Keathley: Well, yeah,
Celine Millinder: Yeah.
E Keathley: no, I I think that one of the reasons that museums have gotten so ahead in the digital asset management game is that their insurers are increasingly requiring this extensive documentation to guarantee the collection. And you know, if you have to come together for all that insurance like core business reason of being, the institution is going to invest more both with people and money into the system. and I've just loved seeing this area of digital asset management grow. For a while it was a little bit behind because museums don't always have the money to invest in, you know, what is essentially an IT initiative. And I think in originally, you know, even just ten years ago, there were a lot of people who are in museum management who weren't as tech forward perhaps as one would hope. Because that's not what they studied. They studied museums. They were classical scholars of some stripe or another and really thought of, you know, IT as this thing that doesn't wasn't necessarily critical to museum operations in the way that, you know, we do. But obviously, as things have come along, you know, there's been a generational shift in that thinking. But I do think that a lot of it was pushed by the insurance industry onto museums. Celine, am I right? Am I wrong? Am I missing the mark here?
Celine Millinder: I suppose that's a really good point. I'd never really thought about it that way, but it's true that the whole point of a collection management system is that you're supposed to be able to have the object like it has to be registered from the moment it enters your collection
Lisa Grimm: Hm.
E Keathley: Sure. Yeah.
Celine Millinder: to the moment it leaves. It has to have everything needs to be documented. And that goes for loaned objects, for anything so when it undergoes any sort of like renovation or that's documented in it so yes there is that part of the CMS that it yeah the role it plays and that's true I'd never really thought of of the insurance bit.
E Keathley: Well yeah, I've I had a lot of very intense discussions. over twenty years ago I was working on a grant with the National Endowment for the humanities for the NEH and I was a preservation services officer, which meant I was helping institutions, cultural institutions get grants and things like that. And I was trying to move institutions into just even having a digital inventory and I had There were people who were just insistent that no, our museum register is a book. The book is written with this kind of pen.
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
E Keathley: The book is stored in this kind of place. Computer files go away. That's not preservation. And I like I would just have to sit there and listen. I would be like, okay, okay, can I scan it? And sometimes scanning it was gonna be the the best way forward. And of course the change in that was really Hurricane Katrina because it wipes so many places in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama. just so completely off the map and anything that wasn't digitized was just gone. And I still I I have some inner grief and I know a lot of other people from my region still do for things that were just lost because if it wasn't digitized before Katrina hit, it's gone from a lot of those collections. you know, what remains is still incredible, you know, but whenever I encounter people in the cultural institution world who are still on that no digit digitization isn't preservation tack. all I have to do is talk about Katrina and the the argument stops. And then of course after that, that was when the insurance companies really leaned in because the losses were so profound twenty years
Celine Millinder: Mm.
E Keathley: ago from Katrina. They were like, no, cultural institutions need to move into digital asset management. We can't guarantee you guys anything unless you can show us everything backed up elsewhere.
Celine Millinder: Wow.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, I hadn't even thought about that. And then of course, a as you say, that in itself is not preservation, that's the beginning of
E Keathley: No, yeah.
Lisa Grimm: part of a preservation plan, which is something we can we'll probably revisit in a future episode, I think, because we can really dig into long term digital preservation and what that means and all that good stuff. But but I will be boring and and bring us back to workflows for a minute. So I think even before we dive into that, I think, you know, there's there's so many different ways you can look at it. You know, is is the workflow effectively just, you know, is this a business process that also exists in your dam? Is a workflow used as a kind of shorthand again for maybe just something That is done. Is a workflow something again that's maybe pre-canned or that you kind of modify? I think there's a lot of different ways you can slice it. So I think maybe we want to think about how we want to kind of define it here as in terms of like how do we see those workflows in the dam or potentially across the ecosystem? Because I think this is so important when you're either working with a consulting client or even in-house. A lot of people take this to mean different things. Celine, what have you Celine, what have you found that's kind of a good way to to level set for for people around this topic?
Celine Millinder: I think that that is you've given me the the trickiest part I think because I think that
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
Celine Millinder: is something that we encounter a lot, you know. I think people want to do workflows and I think the fact that now it's so easy to create workflows in a dam. well I'm talking about specifically in the dam. I'm not talking across different systems. That's another Topic in itself, because then you delve into the APIs and then the interoperability, which I always struggle to say. But but
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, same.
Celine Millinder: here the workflow in DAM, I find that it is a topic that's come up quite a lot recently as well, where you know people are very eager to do workflows. Let's do workflows, let's do workflows. You're right. You the the big question is: okay, but what do you mean by workflow? What what workflow do you want to create? And that workflow idea becomes this, you know, and I suppose one key thing for workflow, to me at least, is that it it should be an agreed path for moving
Lisa Grimm: Hmm.
Celine Millinder: an asset. and it's not just moving an asset, it's also the decisions that need to be made in that moving of the asset. And then, you know. what what do you want that to do? So what's your ultimate goal? And and I guess and all of those things should be defined in order to have, you know, an idea of what that workflow. And when I say agreed, it's because we all have a different idea for workflow. So y
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Celine Millinder: we all three could be in the same team and talking about the workflow, but we maybe have a different like concept of that. and I suppose one key thing is to remember that that has to be something that removes friction and should help people do something quicker or help automate something that is really like a task, a repetit repetitive task. without going any further because I might go a bit too
Lisa Grimm: No, I I think that's a great start because I always like to tell people, you know, never automate a bad process. You know, take the step back first and find out what is it you're trying to do, first of all, like like you said, but then also, is this what you want to automate? Or do you really want to kind of, you know, say, let's take an hour to kind of workshop this with the right people in the room or on the call or or whatever, and say, Okay, but is this is this what we want? Do we want to do it this way versus, well, we can turn the thing on? It's like, well, okay, but You know, does that sort of get us does that really like not move the needle? Did we just move the thing to a different place versus like you say, is it getting you some sort of achievable, you know, business outcome, whether that's doing something more quickly or with, you know, sort of less human intervention or taking out human error? But I think it I I I find where it's been really effective is when you've got time to sort of, you know, s tak you know, sort of sit you know, take that step back, but also have someone who does that sort of business process mapping and is drawing all the boxes and the the arrows and the decision points and you don't always have that Luxury, of course, but I think when you do have someone who can help plot those things out, it it makes a massive difference before you just kind of either go in yourself or go back to your dam vendor or your system integrator and say, let's turn on this workflow that does X. You know, let's let's figure out why we're doing it first and how we really want to do it. And sometimes people just want to turn the thing on and you have to kind of dig into w what are we
Celine Millinder: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: doing?
Celine Millinder: And and I often feel a as though maybe sometimes I feel maybe maybe I'm I'm a bit, you know, it must be frustrating for people, but like for me, recently I was thinking about this and maybe just wanna I wanna know what you think about this, but you know, I was thinking about it. And you know, the DAM in itself is a workflow tool, right? It's it's your life cycle, it's your asset lifecycle in one
Lisa Grimm: Mm.
Celine Millinder: place. And if that is not mature enough, if you haven't got it set up right, then no amount of workflow is gonna help you make anything easier. So I think there's also the other question of before and I guess everyone's at different maturity levels. So maybe someone is at a level where they can go, Yeah, let's just do a workflow and yep, I know the triggers, I know the you know We know the decisions that need to be made, the state changes, and we we know the outcome we want. Great. But I think for for many it's more actually, should we just first look at the foundations and look at, okay, what do we have all our ducks in a row? Is our metadata up to scratch? Is it already working for us before even thinking about workflow? Because you said it earlier on, that metadata will drive. your workflows. So your intentions should already be visible in your dam and that should help you then build your workflows. If that is sound, then there's very little work that needs to be done to build those workflows. I don't know what you think.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, no a hundred percent. Yeah, no Elizabeth, yeah, I'd love to like you I can see the wheels turning and you're you're having some thoughts there.
E Keathley: Yeah, I I mean I just my my least favorite damn consultant task is sometimes a workflow because sometimes what is happening, not all the time, but sometimes what is happening and my worst clients with this have all been video, is that there is actually an HR problem. There's an HR problem, somebody's not turning their files in, there's it's delaying other people's work and there's like and they've decided we're gonna have accountability now. We're gonna put in a workflow tool. We're gonna put in a digital asset management system. And then they call in the digital asset management consultant. Please come save us. Draw out our workflow with us. Okay, let's do it. And the true problem is an HR problem, and the HR problem is not gonna con is not going to they're not gonna cooperate with me. I'm not doing that. Okay, how do you expect me, your digital asset management consultant, To solve your company's HR problem. And I can
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
E Keathley: come back and say, Look, I am gonna build this workflow. And they're like, Well, you gotta make it so that Johnny turns in his stuff. I was like, That I can't do that. I can make it a dependency.
Celine Millinder: Yeah.
E Keathley: You have to make Johnny turn in his files in the right format on the right day. The the the system will not magically force Johnny to turn in his files correctly.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, a hundred percent and and just think about that, yeah.
E Keathley: Will build I will build the workflow that you ask me. I will build the workflow that you ask me. I agree. This system is needed here. You guys need a workflow. It's chaos. We're doing final, final, final all the way through. But I am not
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
E Keathley: your HR rep. Someone else fix this. And this when you find out whether or not the dam is really gonna work. Because if it's going to work, they're going to address the people problem while we're doing it. And if it's not gonna work, they're gonna be like, just set it up, just set it up and I'm gonna go and I know exactly what's gonna happen. Johnny's never gonna use that damn. He's decided he's not, you guys are not gonna fire him. You know, I don't I don't know what to tell you.
Celine Millinder: It it's so true. It's it's so true. But I have also seen the other scenario where there has been an impact to the business and then it wasn't Operational deciding this, it was the senior management that was going, no, we have to introduce something more robust, and we need everything to go through licensing, and therefore we need to build this workflow. And so when that happens, then you have that buy-in because there's no choice, because you're right. how it's not by it's not because you're creating it's it's so frustrating because you know that the workflow would make it easier but as soon as there's a decision or it has to go through that that you know different person for the the asset to move forward of that workflow to work then it really breaks down quite quickly because it it it's not just buy-in it's also well if the notification is an email and that person's off N do you have a you know a a system in place that it goes to someone else? Is there a backup? do you have in-system notifications? Do you have that yeah, those workflows are are definitely very tricky to to to pull off without that
E Keathley: Well
Celine Millinder: full buy-in.
E Keathley: Yeah, and you're talking about top down 'cause you said executives pushing it through 'cause there's been an inde there's been an impact to business. Top down versus bottom up adoption of the dam. It never works from bottom up. It only works from top down. You have to have someone at the top of the organization saying, No, we're gonna do this. You have to use it or we have a real problem. You know. I've I've never seen bottom up work, not once. It has to be
Celine Millinder: No.
E Keathley: top down. You have to have that understanding and buy in from the executives.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, e even with all the goodwill in the world. Yeah.
E Keathley: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. No
Celine Millinder: But
Lisa Grimm: a hundred percent. Yeah.
Celine Millinder: yeah, but then but then those automations, those workflows that are just automating tasks, those are easy, right? Because it's
E Keathley: Mm-hmm.
Celine Millinder: basically just automating a task. It could be useful for a damn admin or you know, there there's full ownership, but it's the ones where you need those decisions. that yeah. Much trickier.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And I think I think that's an important point too is is sort of seeing those that are kind of automations for the dam and the dam admin team who are just like, yes, I can turn this on and this is gonna make my life so much easier if I'm just getting like all the alt text automatically assigned or y you know, wha wh whatever s some of those things are, or I can, you know, set up all of these dates to, you know, sort of expire on the same day and I'll see, you know, X and Y happen. We we love those, but then like you say, when you get these that are much more sort of, you know, decision tree and if So and so is out, who does it go to next? And and and those are the ones where, you know, I've seen some really scary things happen. y you know, again, and like like you're both saying, just mostly through lack of governance, because if you didn't figure it out beforehand and then suddenly you're getting called because, well, I I I started it but so and so's out of town, you're like Well, okay, we tried to build this, but yeah, it you
Celine Millinder: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: you really have to kind of say this is why it's so important to document these and I'm I'm so glad that the project I'm working on now w that we've had a whole sort of sort of deliverable, if you like, to really document all of our policies and procedures and workflows. And I'm like, this is great, I've been given the time and space to do this, and so again I'm I'm getting you know geeking out over policy work. But again, it it's what underpins all of these things and lets us do the fun techie stuff. Because if you've got it written down, then you can go ahead and say, and then here's how it's gonna work. I have something to refer back to. You've got a playbook. And if anyone goes on holiday or changes jobs or anything, you know why that decision was made, you know why that particular workflow was created, or maybe you don't know exactly why it was created, but you can go back and figure it out from the the you know the the other context you've got. So I think that that part around kind of again the governance, the documentation, and just having policies around these things and having what I found is really useful is just kind of a a catalogue of the workflows you have set up because you know if you're in the dam that they exist and you can get to them, but to have it in kind of plain English saying, this is the workflow that pushes things to cold storage, this is the workflow that you know, tells someone that this this license is expiring, then, you know, other people can look at that too and understand what you're talking about. And and that helps I think with that buy-in as well.
E Keathley: Yeah, documentation is really key, especially if you are a contractor of any kind. I mean, it should be standard no matter what, right? But especially as a contractor,
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, everyone should do it. Yeah, yeah. But
E Keathley: not only because you know you're not gonna be there forever, right? That you're you have a predefined time and you're gonna go. Secondly, it gives you a solid deliverable that you can point to and say, like, you know that I did this work, but also here's your documentation of the thing that I did, you know. And third, honestly, as a billable item. so that when we're going over
Lisa Grimm: yeah, absolutely.
E Keathley: our deliverables, like what we're expected, what we're doing, what we're handing over at the end, that you can give them these things that you can point to digitally. But also, my clients really have always responded positively when I have actually just printed out a good old fashioned Visio representation of what we've done. Now
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
Celine Millinder: Yeah.
E Keathley: is it readable? Because Visio doesn't really print very well on
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: Eight and a half by eleven paper? No, it's not. That's not the point. It's a
Lisa Grimm: Hay
E Keathley: customer satisfaction thing that you do.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: You know, to be able to hand them this piece of paper and be like, I know this isn't really readable, but just so you know there is a file and this is what and then they they like it. It makes people happy. So yeah.
Lisa Grimm: very much so. Yeah, and I and I've just realized too, you know, because we're so in the weeds, we should probably take a step back for people who are newer to this, what are common workflows that that we've seen out there in in the field? Because again, if if you're new to DAM or if you're you're new to sort of setting one up right now There will be a lot that, you know, you'll be told, these are all available precanned, you'll wanna do X and Y. But what are some of those that maybe people might want to start with versus those where you might want to say, you know, these may require a little more research and planning and testing before we go into them?
Celine Millinder: Absolutely. I mean, yeah, again, it it it depends on the maturity of the dam and also how well it is adopted, I would say. yeah, but we've mentioned a few already. there you have your review and approvals. the easiest ones are your metadata enrichments, where again it facilitates the job of dam manager, it does ensure consistency. you have your rights and governance. So maybe you have, you know, assets that expire or they're automatically moved out, they're they're not no longer visible. the so there are a number, and then it depends on well, we j that's also life cycle, you could say. But then there's also distribution and publishing, which is probably more for that more mature level where you've got integrated systems.
Lisa Grimm: yeah.
E Keathley: My favorite workflow that I ever did will not apply to any other work environment other than the one I did it in. but I love talking about it because I'm still very proud of it. When I worked at the CDC, I did a workflow that covered one entire wall of a meeting room. And it took us gosh, I think six weeks of interviews to build the workflow because what we were doing was
Celine Millinder: Well.
E Keathley: mapping an existing workflow that they were trying to simplify. And this thing, again, printed out. Vizio printed out, covered the entire wall of a small meeting room. And the workflow
Lisa Grimm: Gosh.
E Keathley: was how do you get live syphilis samples
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha.
E Keathley: to make reference slides for the lab? I was this workflow was for the CDC STI LRRB, so sexually transmitted infection laboratory. research and reference branch. And one of the things that they did nationally, and this no longer exists, this has been dismantled.
Lisa Grimm: Sleep.
E Keathley: yeah, I know. is that in order to identify syphilis on a slide in a lab, labs at hospitals would get reference slides from the CDC so that you know what it looks like under your microscope. And so they were always producing reference slides and these have to be refreshed every couple of years. because the samples die off. not even every couple of years, I think it was quarterly, because the samples die off. and so they were producing a whole reference slide set of chlamydia, syphilis, everything else. and the they were growing syphilis and rabbits. you grow a lot of other things in monkeys. We had the monkey processes too, but the monkey processes were very, very well mapped because of all the rules around working with monkeys. But you grow you grow syphilis and rabbits. And so it just hadn't been as well mapped. and there were several hold ups in this workflow of people getting the asset through. yeah,
Lisa Grimm: Gosh, I bet.
E Keathley: I love that job, man. I'd do it again. And I'm still terrifically proud of that workflow. and we did get some of it simplified. And I was working with the group where they were trying to figure out how not to have to use live animals to grow this thing. I don't think it's been figured out yet. but it was an amazing workflow to get to to get to visualize with them. So
Celine Millinder: But you kind of started with something quite complex. You know, we were thinking more of the simple and where could you start? You've already gone to that like that, you know, wall for us.
E Keathley: Yeah
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: yeah. Because there's ethical concerns to go back to your work
Celine Millinder: Yeah.
E Keathley: with Save the Children. Like they're
Lisa Grimm: Definitely.
E Keathley: they're a huge like it goes out to an independent review board and then it comes back and then every single animal is accounted for with their entire health history. Like it was very intense. But it hadn't been in a workflow tool. It had been, you know, they had had a written procedure, but they didn't have a workflow and they didn't have a workflow tool. And that's part of what I was there to do. As part with a limb, which is a laboratory information management system, which is a a kind of dam. You never know where this work is gonna take you. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, which we keep telling people. That's the thing. We keep telling people there's all these other things that don't call themselves dams, but are really dams. I know there's a lot to
E Keathley: It's a damn.
Lisa Grimm: in kind of like the evidence management space as well, and certainly there's a lot of legal information tools that effectively are dams or also just putting this out there for the legal field would be better served in a dam versus some of the tools that are out there. So call us, we can we can help you, you know.
E Keathley: And some of the legal tools that have been developed have been developed in isolation in their field and they really need to cross pollinate with other digital asset management fields for simplification. And you wanna talk about consulting charges, man, legal firms, woo, there's a lot going on there.
Celine Millinder: But I think I'm 'cause I can't really help on the legal side, but I wanna come back to, you know, what you said. You said you built the workflow but you had all the interviews. So how many like y you said how long did you spend on the on interviewing the users?
E Keathley: I think it was so that entire workflow, it was a it was six weeks to build that workflow. And I was in a I was in a larger contract. the first contract was a year, the second contract within was two years, was there three years total? But within those contracts, I was budgeted to different depart departments for different specific tasks. So I know that the mapping of that workflow I can't remember if it was we're talking about ten years ago now. I it was either six or eight weeks a a block for that department where they said come in and map this workflow and then we're going to implement the workflow in the limb, which was the bigger, you know, contract I had was with the limb. how many how many interviews? At least a month of talking to people, because I had to track people down because they had a written procedure that was a word dot. That said these
Celine Millinder: Mm-hmm.
E Keathley: are the steps that we go through. But of course that that was outdated. People had changed jobs. People had moved around. They were like, you know, Sally used to do that, but she retired and sometimes now we send it to Jane and so yeah, making up names. Sometimes now we send it to Jane and sometimes now we send it to Nikia, whatever. so I had to go through and remap, you know,
Celine Millinder: Mm.
E Keathley: off of this outdated Word document what the process actually was. And everybody knew this was a problem. It wasn't contentious in any way. They knew I was there to fix it, you know.
Celine Millinder: But I think I think
E Keathley: yeah.
Celine Millinder: that's such a great point because I think now again, coming back to the fact that it's so easy to build certain workflows that you know, you can go in and get quite trigger happy and just go and like build it. But
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Celine Millinder: actually there's all
E Keathley: No.
Celine Millinder: of that there's that whole process of like documenting it, but but using Visio I find really helpful because it really shows you the decision making points. Or the triggers, or you
E Keathley: Exactly.
Celine Millinder: know, w when are you uploading data? When is data being handled? All of those are super important to really be able to visualize what you're trying to build alongside building it in the platform. But there's that process of iteration, right? And and constantly kind of testing it with the users and then going back, tweaking it. But all of those are quite important to be able to
E Keathley: Well
Celine Millinder: build one that's actually effective.
E Keathley: And everyone has had some exposure, even if it's on just a high school level here in the United States, to what a computer workflow looked like in the eighties. Those basic shapes, there's still an ISO for those. If you go out, it helps just explain to people what you're doing. And if I came in and said, I'm gonna build a workflow in a limb, you know, and I used all the language about metadata and handoffs and all of those things, I would lose a lot of people. But if I throw up a visio chart
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, yeah.
E Keathley: and say, We're gonna map this out, it people automatically recognize the shapes. They know what that is. They've had even if they don't have business school, even if they've only, you know, if their background is straight up just like medical lab like they know what that is. It's not
Celine Millinder: Mm-hmm.
E Keathley: a mystery. It's not a surprise. even if they don't remember what the shapes mean, they're like, yes, this is a yes no. This is a you know, it it does a lot of the work for you automatically, just explaining why you're there and what you're trying to do. And of course when we're building buy in, to a workflow that's gonna be successful, that's really critical.
Celine Millinder: Yeah. And
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Celine Millinder: and I guess there's also the the other question of, you know, you said sorry, I'm just going straight into because before I forget my but you mentioned documentation and and I agree with you that that that's so important, especially as sometimes the workflows are interdependent. So you you'll
Lisa Grimm: Yes.
Celine Millinder: You know, as you build more workflows, you know, you're you're you're gaining traction. That that's great, but you can lose sight of what you actually already have existing. So coming back to what you said, Lisa, earlier on, which is you really need to label them correctly, take time to make sure that you've actually created them properly, not you know, quickly without actually adding titles. But then it's also understanding the interdependence so that we when something goes wrong. You know where to look. That that that's a challenge.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah. And and and I think to have that the right level of detail too, and I know we're not gonna talk too much about the workflows that cross different platforms because that's a whole bigger complicated issue, but even I'm working on something like that right now, but just to know which Which platform is the system of record for which bit of metadata, just just that piece,
E Keathley: Okay.
Lisa Grimm: is going to solve so many problems for you. So know what's coming from your dam, what's coming from your PIM, or again, could be CMS, could be another integrated system, but just that documentation will get, you know, I won't say it will solve all of your problems, but it will really help you be much clearer if something does go wrong. You can trace back to to where it happened. So do do that up front, folks. It's it's gonna just save you time and and lots of heartache later.
E Keathley: And I think also just to hammer home, it's not just the fact that the workflow works at the end of the day. It's not just the fact that you can demo on the dam like this is how we're gonna go through. It's having a deliverable for the people who are cutting you a check at the end of the day. They may not be the ones actually using the workflow, but the people who pay you are going to want to have something in their hand. Even if it's just the written out step by step, you know, any anything that you can hand them is gonna make them happier.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, no, a hundred percent. And and I I think one more piece on on just kind of the if we like how people sometimes get sort of lured into overusing workflows sometimes. I think, you know, when they're in that sort of buying process, like you say, the people who are using the dam or equivalent system are not necessarily the ones who are there in those initial demos. They're not the w there
E Keathley: Paying for it. Mm-hmm.
Lisa Grimm: seeing the sales folks. And again We have lots of damn vendor friends we love, we've got lots of sales friends we love, but sometimes people get excited by the bells and whistles of, ooh, you can do a workflow for this, you can do a workflow for that, but they're not the people ultimately using these tools often at the end of the day. So sometimes then the team running it is there's this real disconnect. So you have to think about, well, were they sold on kind of this promise of the workflows, w which again, in you know, in some cases can mean almost nothing. And and then in others it's massively important. But I I think that's often I'll I'll say more often than it should be kind of what made a particular buying decision go the way it did is because a particular demo that showed a particular automation was a real wow factor to someone, but maybe not the person using it. So I wonder I I feel like we've all been in that situation where then you have to come in and be like, okay That was cool, but w when are we going to use it and how do we sometimes have to square that circle of there is an expectation, like you're saying, for those people up above, they still want something delivered, but is it right for the, you know, right for the team using it? Is it something you're like, we're gonna put it in the roadmap? You know, sometimes it's a very political decision. I'm curious how you how you both navigate some of these things.
Celine Millinder: Yeah, I mean it's that's a difficult one because obviously to your point Elizabeth sometimes you're you're hired to do something and so you have to deliver on it. I think often what what I find is a struggle is defining that workflow. So there's
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm.
Celine Millinder: an idea of a workflow and you're right. Who decided on that is unclear. but there there is that, yes, we must have a workflow and but it's not yet defined or that that's where it gets tricky. So it's managing those expectations and that's that's the tricky bit I would say, because like you say, a lot of people have like, yeah, well let's let's do it, let's build it. It'll it'll okay, but w what are you trying to do? What are you trying to solve? Yeah, which is tricky.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. I I feel like we if we all can just, you know, have a sort of mantra, you know, at least once a day, what are we trying to solve? Just get everyone back on the same page. It it would y you know Yeah.
Celine Millinder: But it's it's so easily done because sometimes you just have to you know you have to deliver on something. You're under pressure, you've got
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Celine Millinder: a set budget, a set time frame to deliver on something, and you're supposed to solve something, you've seen something that works in a platform, you know, you everyone's buying in, great, okay, on the idea, and then there's the delivery, and the delivery is often like a little bit more tricky.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Celine Millinder: but Again, I think now there is such you know, there is that capability in DAM. So I guess the the how is less of an issue, like the you know, the the the functionality. it really is about the execution and making sure that it's thought through properly rather than just throwing in something that's you know, not necessarily gonna deliver. You know, it could be over engineered or it could even be that a workflow is not the solution for that particular problem. You know, often I do say let's let's look at the use case, let's let's look at what it is, and then let's have a look at what do we have out of the box before even going further. So you're right, maybe that has to should be done earlier on in the process. but not
Lisa Grimm: But not always possible.
Celine Millinder: always possible.
Lisa Grimm: good good. So I think we'll we'll we'll begin to wrap it up 'cause I I think we We w we like to sk you know keep saying the same things, but like please, you know, again, consult people who know what it is you're you're trying to do or who have a vision, you know, and then we can, you know, help you get to to where you want to be. But I think if we have to give people maybe one sort of, you know, useful parting tip, and it can be something we've said already, but what would if we have to kind of give one, I'll I'll let you each kind of share one, then I'll come back to mine. But and it's okay if we all end up on the same one, 'cause maybe we're just really passionate about it. But making workflows work, what's what's the one thing you want people to take away?
E Keathley: It has to be a top down management required process to some degree. People are not going to use the workflows unless management says they have to use the workflows.
Lisa Grimm: Very good.
Celine Millinder: Yep. I would say it's not so much the question shouldn't be how much can we automate? Should this be a workflow at all?
Lisa Grimm: very good. Love that.
Celine Millinder: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Love that. And and I will keep coming back to probably this you know, the same thing with a slightly different slant, you know, let's not automate a bad process, let's look at it first, make sure it's something that makes sense. And 'cause, you know, I I like to tell people, w whether they're clients or whether I'm in house somewhere, you know, that the job of, you know the the whole reason we have a dam here is to hopefully make everyone's lives easier. So if it's adding complexity, maybe there's a reason to do that in the short term. But in the long term, what can we do to sort of make it so that you don't have to think about these things? So again Let's make sure it's the right process, you know, the right people doing the right things, and you know, eventually i it will get easier. There may be a learning curve at first, but then you know, we'll get there. So it's all on the roadmap. There we go. there I said it too. It's all on the roadmap. It's like I work for a vendor again.
Celine Millinder: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: So well they well we'll we'll go ahead and leave it there, but again I would say folks who are listening, thank you so much for listening. Go ahead and do the likes, subscribes, all of those things. It does help other people find us. Some of you are beginning to do that. Elizabeth is again showing folks the book. It's it's lovely in its sort of black and blue and pinkish. I I'm not even sure how pink or purple it really is, because I haven't seen it yet, as I will continue to say.
E Keathley: Well, you know, the colors on this cover, when we were writing, this was my hair color and this was your hair color. We were not like shifting around a little bit.
Lisa Grimm: That's true, it was pretty close. Yeah. So there you go, folks. Behind the behind the music there, you know, all about hair colours. So thank you, but thank you, Celine. We will catch up again in person soon. We will either be in London or Paris together in the not too distant future. Probably both, you know. Why not both?
Celine Millinder: I hope so. I hope sooner than later. And Elizabeth as well. Hopefully, what if you ever come over in Europe, I would love to see you as well.
E Keathley: love to go back.
Lisa Grimm: Here, here.
E Keathley: I'll let you know when I'm there.
Celine Millinder: Please do.
Lisa Grimm: brilliant. So with that, thank you folks. We'll see you again. Goodbye.
Celine Millinder: Thanks all. Bye.
