Lisa Grimm: Hello, and welcome back to Practical Dam, a podcast about digital asset management. It is the companion to the new book, which my charming and erudite co-host, Elizabeth Keithley, is showing off for those of you who are watching. It is a it is Practical Digital Asset Management, a guide for students and practitioners, available now. My name is Lisa Grimm. I am your host. Elizabeth is my co-host. Say hello, Elizabeth.
E Keathley: Hello everyone.
Lisa Grimm: And we are thrilled to be joined by another amazing damn practitioner. This week we have Meg Borrissey. Welcome, Meg. How are you?
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Hi, I'm doing great. How are you?
Lisa Grimm: we are thrilled to have you. We're you know, I think we're we're making it work. We're we're we're getting by. There we go. So today's topic, which
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah, yeah. I think it's going great.
Lisa Grimm: is one I'm quite excited about. It's going great. One I'm quite excited about is what we're calling making dam usable. And we can get into all kinds of sort of nitty-gritty around things like user experience and and that kind of thing. But we're really gonna focus a bit more on kind of what are the kind of things that really need to be in place for your dam to be functional, not just getting to go live, but how are you actually getting value out of it? How do you know that you're actually making this work for people and that people are going to be using? it so we'll talk a bit about you know what are some of those things you must have in place whether it's again processes policies all all of that good stuff what do you have to have configured but then again how are you actually running this day to day so before we dive into the topic though throwing this over to you Meg give give an introduction to the people out there tell them a little bit about how you've ended up in this strange world with us and a little bit about your your journey along the way
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah, well, I am a librarian and taxonomist and archivist. I do I do all the things. I've been in the digital asset management space for about twelve years, thirteen years, and I started in grad school cataloging on media bin and car parts because I went to Michigan and you're legally required to work somewhere in the auto industry if you live
Lisa Grimm: That's a very good one.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): in that part of the state. and you know, since then I've been to a lot of mostly really large organizations who can afford a few full-time you know damn program members and that's been that's been really really interesting and I've kind of worn every hat. I've worked on custom dams, I've been an in-house dam manager, I've implemented, I've migrated, I've, you know, sunset, of course, and you know, I've been a consultant, I've been a vendor working with the vendors. I've worked with engineering teams, I've worked with, you know, marketing teams and everything in between. And I'm gonna toot my own horn for one thing.
Lisa Grimm: please do, yes.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): everything you see on Disney Plus goes through my system and uses the data
E Keathley: Nice.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): model that I created for automation. So
E Keathley: Nice.
Lisa Grimm: Love it.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): very satisfying to see that. and I was there when it launched and it was terrifying.
E Keathley: I bet. Was that North Plains back in the day?
Meg Morrissey (she/her): we were all in house. we worked
E Keathley: Really?
Meg Morrissey (she/her): we well, we worked with we worked with a couple of folks. That's how I got to know John Hordisky, was was through was through Disney, but we had like seventy marketing agencies around the world who we were working with and the company bought a couple of them that I I worked with primarily for designing all of all of those workflows and we had a team of about fifty on
E Keathley: And that was all out of Southern California, not Orlando, right? Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): It was in Southern California. There's a separate dam in Orlando that works with the parks.
E Keathley: Yeah, the right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yep. Yep. And I was at the studio and it was it's still one of my favorite, absolutely top three projects I've ever worked on.
E Keathley: Very cool. I don't think people realize how many digital asset managers have gone through the Orlando theme park shop. which
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
E Keathley: really should be like a damn si like we should we should do like an investigative series at some point if Lisa and I could ever get people to talk, maybe we'd have to have like blacked out, like pixelated and some like voice recognition stuff, you know. voice alteration stuff running out of there. Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): You need an alumni group.
E Keathley: We need an alumni
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: group willing to ex real where we could interview, like do like a five part like Orlando theme parks series on them and Universal and their dams. so anybody
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah, yeah, universal. Mm-hmm.
E Keathley: anybody who's out there who's worked in Orlando in digital asset management, if you want to do some like off the record stuff with us, we will protect your identity, which we can do.
Lisa Grimm: A hundred per cent. Yeah?
E Keathley: because we're we're talking today about making damn usable, but by the time this comes out, Lisa and I will be ready to launch the new damn salary survey. so be on
Lisa Grimm: Coming back.
E Keathley: the lookout for that
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yes.
E Keathley: on LinkedIn. But to get into making damn usable, we we have a lot of stuff in this chapter of the book about ACLs, about user interface, about kits, collections, all kind of stuff. Lisa, where where should we start?
Lisa Grimm: That's that's the funny thing. Like it's it's hard to know where to start, but I think, Meg, your introduction is is
E Keathley: Ha ha ha.
Lisa Grimm: so helpful because like like you, we've all been kind of on almost every side of the equation. Like, you know, like you say, either in-house or with the vendor or with a system integrator. And I feel like depending on which of those you're in, you start in very different places and the solutions you might be given as kind of the person or the team gonna be who are gonna be owning the dam may be kind of at odds with with you know, with each other and kind of what if you like, what order of operations to To attack those things in. So I think I I think it'd just be good to kind of get some perspective on where do you is there a right place to start? And obviously it's gonna vary from project to project, but what do you think are are some of those non-negotiables you need in order to get to that sort of, you know, we can take the box, we can go live, we've got the basics in place to to kind of get us over the line and then build from there. So what's what's a good what's your what what are some of your top tips for that?
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Ooh. A system, a damn team, preferably
Lisa Grimm: That helps, yes.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): led by one person, not five
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): people who are going to devote a
E Keathley: Ha
Meg Morrissey (she/her): few hours a month and all work together to cover it. Please, please, please,
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): one person where the buck stops, one person who is responsible for that relationship with your vendor. one person who can say, yes, this supports it, no, this doesn't, hold me accountable for the timeline. I've worked in
E Keathley: And that's a hundred percent of their job.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, exactly.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yes, that would be that would be fantastic if we could get out of, well, they're gonna spend, we've got like 20 hours a week where where we can play with this. There's there's red flags there. And I know they're gonna be bringing me in later.
E Keathley: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: exactly. Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): yes, so that's that's my if you leave with one thing, have one person who is running the show. I've worked in a place where there were two, one involved with tech, one in product, and they jointly,
Lisa Grimm: Mm.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): there's nobody to take responsibility for four things, like for the timeline, for all of it. There's no way to prioritize across that if you've got those two things at at the same level. so that's that's number one and two and three.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): I would say number four is a metadata model, the scaffolding.
Lisa Grimm: Here, here.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): of a metadata model where it is it's a living thing, making sure that it's there s yeah.
E Keathley: Yeah, and I wanna add on, when we're talking about metadata modeling, I had a contract in the last few years, in the last decade, where I came before I came in, before I took the job, they said, and don't worry, we already have a framework of a metadata model for you to to get off and and running with. And I was like, Fantastic, we have a place to start. And I got there and it was exclusively technical metadata. It was there was no descriptive metadata that had been done.
Lisa Grimm: fantastic.
E Keathley: There was no administrative metadata that had been done.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm.
Lisa Grimm: my god. Delightful.
E Keathley: so they had one of the three types of metadata. One. And they thought they were done.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Ready to run.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: And they thought they were done. They were like, it's no, no, no, no. We're we're we got we got it set up with the vendor. We did it right away. And I got it and went, no, no.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): no. Not good. Not what you want. And I've never picked up a metadata
E Keathley: They didn't know.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): model that was ready to go. It never picked
E Keathley: Yeah, no. Well it
Lisa Grimm: yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): up a metadata model. No one's ever handed me one that was actually ready for prime time. but you're
E Keathley: Well, and everybody everybody on this call knows that your first twenty thousand assets or so you're gonna reload them like three times if you're starting from ground zero. Like you're gonna reload them three times because the gap between theory and practice, between what you think, how you think users are gonna use the system and how it turns out users actually encounter that system and experience it is gonna be different. And you can do every focus group in the world and the users can say, we're gonna do this, this and this but then when this system actually rolls out you know, after those first ninety days you're gonna have to come in, reload everything and make profound changes to the descriptive metadata.
Lisa Grimm: Hundred percent. Yeah. I I'm feeling that now. I'm in UAT and we're already getting that feedback of, you know, we had something but again we knew this was gonna happen, so we've built in time, which is the way to
E Keathley: That's that's just how it that is
Lisa Grimm: do it. Yeah.
E Keathley: just how it goes. That's not a mistake. That's just yeah, it's just part of the process. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Exactly. No, it's part of the process. And I think that's important. Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, a hundred
Meg Morrissey (she/her): I
Lisa Grimm: percent. Yeah. Sorry, go on, Meg, yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah. well you only get one first impression. So, and that takes a lot of work to come back from. And I've made the mistake of, well, we we have some things that we really just can we just get them in now and they can be browse only, and then you know, we'll enhance them later, and that way they'll have quick, secure access to these things as they come in. And I made the mistake of saying yes. And That group, which was a core user group, you know, said we can't find half of what we're looking for. I type something in the top bar and it's not there. It doesn't matter
E Keathley: Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): that they asked me for browse only. That's that's gone. That's not a valid response, is well, you you said you wanted browse only because those aren't the people who made the decision for browse only.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Their managers are the people who made the decision for browse only. All they know is there's a dam. And they can't find what they need.
E Keathley: My my most successful strategy for that so far has been when you come in, because you're you know, part of the job is breaking down information silos to make the dam usable. You're facilitating these these this discovery across groups so that people can find things that other people were doing that they didn't even know they had, you know, to prevent duplicate work, all the good things that we talk about, damn. But my most successful strategy so far is that when I come in, I go around to all the different groups. And I say, what is one thing that you want to share? Just one. And then I tell all the groups, everybody's gonna share one thing so that you can see how it works and we can talk about how this process is gonna go. And then when we kind of do that soft launch, you know, after 90 days or six months or, you know, however long it took to get there for everybody to give me one thing, bring everybody back in and say, All of these groups, these nine groups, these ten groups, these 24 groups, have each given me one asset so you guys can see what this looks like. Now let's all talk about what we do and don't like about the way it's working right now. And I just make it really, really clear. We're not doing a soft launch with browse only. We're it's
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
E Keathley: full functionality, but right now we all understand this is a test. And we're not this is in no way complete. And because every single group has given me one thing, they understand there's just one thing from every group in there. And then we can
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
E Keathley: move forward from that. But I've been in that position where they're like, No, no, no, just get just get this in, just get this campaign in, just this campaign. And it's yeah, it's you're right, Meg. It's kind of a disaster.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah, and it's it it's impossible to come back from. And even as you're enhancing the metadata, they're not gonna come back a week later and look for the same thing.
Lisa Grimm: Right.
E Keathley: No. Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): so so coming back, you know, getting that better and better and then reintroducing it was the only thing that worked for us was okay, well you're beta testers, you get early access, you're welcome, congratulations. It's not perfect. We're going to be asking you what's not perfect as we go through. And you're going to get to see, you're going to get to own it. And that's something that helps so much with adoption and just general change management. Is this was made by you, you know, by me, with you, for you. And
E Keathley: Well, and you can also Yeah, and you can also create some FOMO. You can also, when you're
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yes.
E Keathley: doing those test those test things, one thing I like to do again, like I'm giving away all my little tricks here, but the people that are gonna
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Writing doom.
E Keathley: see it, like it's it's only people that are in our industry are gonna see this. Like peop it's not gonna damage my stuff later on. But like when
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: we're when you're doing those test groups and you just have like that one thing from everybody, you include them in on a secret, which is that we're not letting everybody see this yet. This is just for you
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, yeah.
E Keathley: because we understand that you, the person who's gonna own it later, is special and you get this special advanced access. We're not gonna show everybody any of anything. And if they're really super into it and they actually like s show interest and they seem like they're getting excited, I'll be like, by the way, you know, if if they want to do that, if I like feel like I've kind of like got the carrot going, I'll be like, and since you're extra special because you understand what we're doing. I'm gonna show you what it could look like later. And then they're excited about it because you've given them, you know, a kind of like a backstage pass. Like you've made it a little bit more special for them. So then they have more buy-in. And giving and doing that one or two assets in the beginning to give them something to show off to their group, that also like creates more of a feeling of that ownership that you're talking about, Meg.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah, yeah. I think that, you know, I ideally before they pick the system, they have that one person in place and they know they know why they need it. That's another piece that's so important.
E Keathley: Ha ha ha
Lisa Grimm: We Yes, we all wish. Yeah, I know.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Why do you actually need this? I I know, you know, you're
E Keathley: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): you're getting out of OneDrive. Great, but why do you need this? What is your mission? And how can your dam program support your mission? Tell me what your priorities are. Tell me your strategic initiatives for this year. Tell me what's coming up that I can make us indispensable for. Let me help you get your bonus this year. And
E Keathley: Yeah. And that's
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. That's a great one. Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): yes, and keeping keeping that going, keeping that conversation with leadership going, of giving them a sneak peek once it's basically once it's ready, but giving them a a sneak peek of, okay, we have this new workflow. We've kicked the tires, we're ready, you know, we've we've got stuff in and we're about to announce it. We're gonna show it to you first and we're gonna get your feedback, which is usually just it's great, we love it. but give them an opportunity for feedback and and really get them excited because a lot of organizations, with a few exceptions, which have been honestly very difficult, they are, you know, it's it's hierarchical. It's a it's a vertical
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): org. And once you have that leadership buy-in, that permission for someone to test it and to give you their time, because that is such people being generous with their time and telling you what they do and how they do it and testing it for you and searching for the best assets to provide you, that takes time out of their their regular job. And without leadership giving them permission and saying, okay, I know one of your projects this week is helping with the dam. And we're gonna count that as one of the things that you're doing this week, versus not having that leadership visibility because they are being generous with their time. This takes up, this is labor on their part as well.
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And if they don't feel that they have permission to spend that time, They're just gonna say, no, I have too many projects. Can we do this in a month? I don't have the time for a meeting. you know, I had to cancel this, so sorry. I'll get it to you soon. I just have to finish this big project. And before you know it, your two-month launch is now six months. And you don't have control
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): over that, but you can head that off with getting that, getting that buy-in all the way, all the way up the chain, getting that buy-in. And specifically saying, okay, this is gonna take up time. Give me three people on your team who you can take five hours a week for the next couple of weeks of digging through things, or more realistically, two hours. You're never gonna get more than two hours from
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): from someone in a in a given week. So choose wisely where that's going. Expensive meetings. Do we need every single person in the room? and getting that relationship going, you know, like you said, going to each of these groups, getting that relationship going, getting them excited, and also showing their leadership what we can do quickly and being really, really efficient with their time. Like I prioritize ruthlessly if I've got a call with anyone, honestly, because they're gonna stop showing up. And I know we're gonna talk about governance, but that is a big piece of governance. Is it's
Lisa Grimm: Hundred percent.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): not sexy. And one of the ways to get people in is to just be really efficient. And if you can cancel the meeting, cancel the meeting. People love a magical free hour of their time. and
Lisa Grimm: It's true.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): you know, really really meeting them where they are. But so you need and you need those use cases. You get those use cases, you learn about their entire asset life cycle. You talk to ideally you talk to the photographers if you're doing photography. You talk to the people who are making those 3D models that you're going to be storing. And you you talk to whoever is creating things or you talk to the designers, you talk to whoever you can to understand What are they making? Why are they making it? What do they know about it right now? How can I get that in so that my metadata is as far up the chain as possible in that life cycle? And how can I keep it going? How can I get that file name? That sweet, sweet file name that actually
Lisa Grimm: Yes. Keep this character limit, but also has all of these meaningful pieces and parts to it. Yes.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And it's it's another one where you need scaffolding. Because you need
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm, exactly.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): you need your file name to be foolproof if you're going to, and someone, someone in the supply chain is always going to build automation off of your file name. It might be you,
E Keathley: Yeah, I
Lisa Grimm: Absolutely.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): it might be somebody else, someone is going to do it.
E Keathley: Yeah. There was during one of my maternity leaves, I had a vendor convince a client that file names didn't matter.
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha
Meg Morrissey (she/her): I just
E Keathley: And I came back from maternity leave and a manager sat me down and said, While you were gone, because I that was like one of their things, like while I was gone, while I'm while I'm gone, please come up with a naming convention. I came back and they were like, Listen, we just decided that since we had unique IDs on the assets, we we're not gonna force a naming convention. And I
Lisa Grimm: God.
E Keathley: looked directly at the manager and I said, I understand the decision's been made. I understand the way that you're telling me that it's been made, that this ship has sailed. But I want you to know that in the next couple of years you're gonna come back to me and you're gonna tell me I was right. And I'm never gonna talk about it again. And we both she like basically
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha.
E Keathley: was like, Fine. And sure enough, like about two years later she sat down with me for lunch and was like, Hey, so
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yep. You know,
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): it's you're building your own pipeline for future work. Why they do that?
E Keathley: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yes.
E Keathley: I mean I dun I don't know what to tell you, man.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): It yes. I and making metadata, making governance sexy
E Keathley: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): is such a specific skill and not enough people have it. I think I'm about fifty percent of where I want to be. There is an executive at Disney. sorry. There's an executive in a company I worked for. Big company. Yeah. Yes.
E Keathley: Hold on. Let's give Lisa a clean edit. Can you back up and start over?
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yes. making it sexy is difficult. I once had the good fortune to work with an executive who knew how to do that, who could go to a lunch and come back with resources and buy-in for a metadata specific project.
Lisa Grimm: We love it.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And to be a fly on
E Keathley: Nice.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): that wall, I would have paid money. To do that. And all all
Lisa Grimm: Amazing.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): I got out of him was it doesn't matter what you think is important. It only matters
Lisa Grimm: Hmm.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): what they think is important. And
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): if you can make your goals align with theirs in a way that gives them the flashy bits. My work isn't flashy, my work makes your flashy possible. And all I need is this to get it done.
E Keathley: Meg, do you ever have a tough time explaining to your clients the difference between the back end of the dam and the user interface?
Meg Morrissey (she/her): had a lot of I haven't had clients who've had a had a had trouble with it. I mean I I describe it as a restaurant. in in the back end we
E Keathley: That's a good that's a good analogy. Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): are we are not just cooking it we are you know we're we're adding things to it We have our workflow. I've worked in enough restaurants, you know, you have your expo, you have who I is kind of your damn manager. Well, the manager, I guess, is the damn manager. But the expo is definitely someone who is for the uninitiated, uninitiated, waiting by the kitchen where they put out the food, ready to make sure this order has three of its four dishes. Where is this one? This one is ready to go, flagging the server, making sure that this Food gets to you hot and correctly. And that's what the dam does is our users are sitting in the dining room, they've ordered and they expect something specific when they order that. And if you give them something else, they're gonna send it back. And maybe they won't
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): come back to your restaurant if they're not getting what they expected.
Lisa Grimm: my god, a hundred percent. And I think it you said something in there too that was was so important about, you know, obviously there's there's the making the governance sexy or or you're trying your best to do that. But I think, you know, some of these things are so fundamental and they can get, you know, sort of hand waved away, like you know, talking about naming conventions. I'm working on something right now where one of the things I'm doing before we go live is literally just documenting every single, you know, naming convention approach, what what does this go for you know, what what kind of asset does this apply to, you know, what's the what's the kind of use case, all these things. But, you know, it's so important as a part of governance to have these kind of living and updated, you know, playbooks and, you know, all
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yes.
Lisa Grimm: of these sort of references to policies and procedures. And especially as you get into these really complex stacks where, like you said, there might be automation happening so far downstream, you have no idea that this is even, you know, being consumed somewhere. So unless you have documented, again, the data flows across your whole system. What's the system of record for this kind of metadata versus that kind of metadata?
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm-hmm.
Lisa Grimm: Like it it just becomes absolutely untenable if, you know, the one person who knows X or Y about a system leaves. And so I feel like you you can't tick that go live box or that upgrade box or whatever you want to call it until you've done that behind the scenes stuff that's not even necessarily in the dam. It's just documentation, it's policies, it's procedures, it's who owns What? It's putting together all of those people who sit on, you know, your data council or, you know, whatever and making that, like you said, interesting to people. Like, how do you get them to kind of come back for it? And it's it's a real it's a real challenge. And I think it's one of these things that people don't realize is kind of like so much a part of what we do is, you know, really aligning the all these sort of different strategic elements behind the scenes. But it's You know, 'cause it's it's easy enough to think this is a technology project. These are never technology projects. We know that. There's technology, but it's people, it's processes.
E Keathley: Ha ha ha.
Lisa Grimm: And
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: how do we say this is where you want to spend your time? It's talking to people, getting them to interact with it, getting them to understand too that this isn't a photo library they're getting. That might be what they've been kind of sold by sort of executives.
E Keathley: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm-hmm.
Lisa Grimm: This is again something that is strategic, that is moving things, doing things to things, transforming things across the system and that's gonna change the way they work and how do you get them out of kind of the vision that maybe they were sold by you know maybe internal management who didn't kind of know what the quite they were looking for versus kind of where you were like, like you said I understand what you're trying to do. How can I help you get there? And that's I think the
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm-hmm.
Lisa Grimm: secret sauce.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
E Keathley: I would really I would really encourage everybody who's having that struggle, Lisa, to go read some pieces on data governance and just start using that language because the field of data
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: governance, while it comes from a different information science sort of lineage than librarianship, it's got the buzzwords that the MBAs are going to respond to right now. So data governance, data lineage, which is we were all trained to call provenance. Nobody knows what provenance is. If you say respect dead spons, people
Lisa Grimm: Right.
E Keathley: look like you're an alien. You can't do that. But if you
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
E Keathley: say data lineage, they understand that concept. And if you can like pull out some visio charts and be like, and the dam can express these relationships between the paperwork and the object, whether it's physical or digital, you know, I think that that can really be helpful in that instance.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah, yeah, and it this this comes into language. You need to speak their language. You need to understand their language when you're when you're putting together your mission statement, your scope, which comes out of your mission statement, your your metadata model, you
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): have to understand what they mean by asset. Which sometimes can be two or three different things within teams who
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): work together, which is always really interesting.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And you have to you have to ask those questions where they're gonna come out of a call and you have to have the right people, people who are game for this, saying, you know, my brain broke a little bit and I have a headache, but that was a great call.
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And you know, I could never, I would never want to do what you someone told me this and I did not know if I should be if I should feel good about it or not, but I'm choosing in hindsight to feel good about this, which was, you know, I would never, ever, ever, ever in my whole life wanna do what you do, and I'm really glad you're doing it.
Lisa Grimm: Awww.
E Keathley: I get that. I I've gotten that in every single, I think, every single contract I've ever done,
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
E Keathley: every workspace I've ever done, which is people expressing a horror that I enjoyed doing this. and
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm-hmm. Yes.
E Keathley: it's it's really interesting because you know, when I was in library school a million years ago up at Simmons, I was in an archival management class and there was someone to my right who had a bag of MMs and they were sitting there and they were sorting all the MMs by color before they ate them. And I was like, I do that. And then another person right behind me said, yeah, I do that too. And I just looked around at the classroom and I just asked because we were waiting for the professor to get there. They were a little bit late or something. I said, How many of us in here sort our candy by color before we ate? And like Yeah, like everybody in the room. And then like one guy who's over in the corner is like, I don't know what's wrong with you people. And I wonder if that
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha.
E Keathley: person is still in the field. Like
Lisa Grimm: Right. It is so library school coded. Amazing.
E Keathley: It's enjoyable. I know.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): It really information professionals, we are we like things neat and tidy. and and I hope we continue to do so because all of our labor that is absolutely invisible to our end users is so important to their experience. I always tell them, like, my goal, I know these meetings are breaking your brain. We have to have the hard meetings right now so that when when our end users look at our system, they think this is really freaking easy. I could have done this. Of course this
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): goes here. Of course this is what comes up when I type it. you know, this this weird phrase, this acronym. good lord, the initialisms
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): and the acronyms that come with every company. The first thing I do when I enter an organization is is I source out if someone already has one, because there's usually someone on the team who
E Keathley: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): you want to know who has their own little glossary. And then I can because I always start building one. What does that mean? AO means airport operations? There was no way I was going to get that on my own. Not to mention all the department names. but but going back to what you need to have in place, your mission statement, your buy-in, all of your good clean use cases that go holistically through the entire, ideally the entire asset lifecycle, but when you're first starting out, at least to your beta testers where they're using it and how they're using it. Get at least that far. Your documentation, which we we touched on a little bit, but having all of that, having things written down so that as all of this is changing and you're iterating as you're learning, you remember why you did the thing that now makes no sense. And
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): you can document why it makes no sense and what you're doing instead, because six months from now someone's gonna want to change it back. And your training. You have to understand
E Keathley: Well and if
Meg Morrissey (she/her): how to use it. And it's usually really simple at the beginning because you don't have that many features at the beginning. You don't
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): have that many workflows. But
E Keathley: Well, y you know, I've gotten pushback on the fact that I call myself an information scientist, but the fact of the matter is that what we're doing is information science and the root of all science is if you didn't record it, if you didn't write it down somewhere somehow, then it's not science. Like science is just documenting the things, right? Like, you know, to go into the the natural science, you know, if s when someone discovers a new snail or whatever, well the snail's al always been there. But it wasn't science until somebody wrote it down, right? And documented what that snail's doing and where it lives and what it eats and the whole thing. That's science. And when we're talking about information science, all these assets exist independently whether or not we're organizing them and creating access to them, arranging, describing, creating access to and preserving these things or not. They exist.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm-hmm.
E Keathley: But it becomes information science when we add in that structure and that documentation. And that's why we deserve to be paid like scientists. Because what we're doing is information science. We're putting in all of these layers that are continuing they're going to continue to make these assets usable, you know, which is the whole point of the dam. If it's used, it's usable. And so what we have to do is layer in all of this metadata, all of this expertise that we as consultants bring to the table so that the digital asset management system has been worth the investment in time and money.
Lisa Grimm: Here, here.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah. Garbage in, garbage out. and
E Keathley: Yeah, for sure.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): and I heard a now, this is a fictional person, but it was really beautifully written, so I'm going to I'm going to quote it. an at a theoretical physicist who waxed poetic on the importance of pencils.
E Keathley: Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Because nothing exists until you write it down.
E Keathley: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And observing And documenting, as you said, is science.
E Keathley: Well it exists, but who knows about it?
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yes.
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yes. If if if a fifty thousand dollar photo shoot is sitting in a desk drawer
Lisa Grimm: Anyway
Meg Morrissey (she/her): on a drive, does it exist?
E Keathley: Hey, remember when
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: fifty thousand dollars was a lot of money?
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah. I do.
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha. Yeah. And then
Meg Morrissey (she/her): In a minute.
Lisa Grimm: again you go back to change management. It's all part of it. Like, you know, your
E Keathley: Right.
Lisa Grimm: vendors aren't gonna start magically delivering things to your dam unless you've told them this change is coming. And you know, again, we we can talk about You know, th we'll we'll probably talk a bit more about change management in in another episode. But I think again, it's part and parcel of the sort of you know, it you know, it never stops changing. So you're always, you know, making sure you're continuing to socialize these things, explaining to people again and again, because they won't hear you the first time, or maybe even the fifth time, or the twentieth time, that this is not a project, this is a program, this is something that's
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: going to be continuously running. And again, that's why you need a person who is the ultimate y you know, arbiter of actually making things happen. It doesn't work when it's, you know, we're gonna have, you know, three people do X or Y part time because again, it's it's not just about the tagging, it's about all these strategic, you know, pieces. And, you know, ideally you've
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: got, you know You're a kind of product owner, but then you have a team who can do some of these other operational tasks, but you need someone to make the decisions and to just, you know, evolve
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yes.
Lisa Grimm: it. And, you know, otherwise y you know, you can have the best vendor in the world, maybe it's even a great fit and you got to be there, you know, choosing that vendor at the beginning. But unless someone is driving that continuously, it just it is going to sort of die a death. So
E Keathley: Well and succession
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yes.
E Keathley: and succession management. You know, one of the great gifts that the recent AI hype turmoil has given us over the last two years is that the layoffs and the retirements were so dramatic and so extreme that the change management and the succession management to both of your points about there's somebody who knows where things are, right? Well, they don't live here anymore.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yep. Yep.
E Keathley: And there's going to be a lot of work for all three of us figuring out, you know, loss of institutional knowledge as to where the files are and what exactly happened. I really think that the next I'd say five to ten years of work that the three of us are gonna have is gonna be coming in and cleaning up over after the dramatic staff cuts that have happened over the last two years where people thought that AI could come in and do these jobs. And to be fair, they were sold that, right? Vendors sold them this promise of
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
E Keathley: people replacement. That's not actually really gonna happen in a lot
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
E Keathley: of ways. They're gonna have to come back and rehire. And they're probably gonna have to hire one of us or one of our other fellow podcast guests to come in and clean up some mess.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah, AI is the new offshoring.
Lisa Grimm: Yes.
E Keathley: Yeah, that's that's very true. Some of it's gonna work, some of it's not.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And and it is i there's you know, I've been asked that question, you know, when I'm managing a team and someone is leaving. Okay, well, we need to backfill, so let's, you know, let's start the hiring process. Ideally, we give them a few days together, a week or two together, so there is a knowledge transfer versus me trying to remember everything and then teaching it to someone else when I mostly understood what they were doing.
E Keathley: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): You know, I'm I delegate. I delegate well.
E Keathley: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Which means I might not know precisely how they do that thing that they're doing twice a week that I didn't know they were doing, but as it's doing.
Lisa Grimm: No.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): and and they tell you, well, you know, we're we're looking at this AI tool, it's part of a larger initiative. Could we instead go with like a 40 hours a month contractor? And then, you know, you'll have this AI tool once you implement it. So I have fewer staff to implement it. and I will forever have fewer staff members to make sure that what goes into your AI tool gives you the correct answers. I heard recently, you know, it's not gonna tell you it doesn't know. It's going
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): to give you the wrong answer and give it to you quickly and confidently. And you get to deal
E Keathley: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): with the fallout.
E Keathley: And we've Lisa and I have discussed with previous guests how the the tools that do work, the large language model tools that do work, which are being marketed as AI, have been native to
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yes.
E Keathley: Dam for a while. Lisa, what are some of the best ones that you've worked with?
Lisa Grimm: I th I think if if we're talking about just kind of features and functionality, I do think there are some useful AI agents you can turn on in and and again, like you say, is it really AI? It it's kind of it sort of doesn't matter, although it does mean you can pay for
E Keathley: It just moot, I guess. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: AI credits when it comes to like who's paying for it, that's where it, you know, becomes important
E Keathley: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: to track what's what. But I do think you know, in in as much as a lot of that kind of automated metadata tagging is Still kind of messy and still kind of basic. And obviously you still need a ton of governance so you don't just create noise. There are
E Keathley: Mm.
Lisa Grimm: some really nice tools that you you can feed it sort of on a model. Like like what one good example is to say, I want alt text on every image. It should follow this standard, and then it can go and do that at scale. So you're giving it a very
E Keathley: Yeah. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: clear, you know, sort of prescription, if you like to say, go off and do. Fantastic. Then you've got your accessibility figured out, you've got something basic for all of them, and it can go off and Yeah, you can happily do that. Well, is it happy who who can say? That's a whole other philosophical question. So but
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: there's things like that that can work really well where it's got guardrails, you know what model it's using, you know what information you've fed it, you can kind of you know, really kind of keep on on top of that. So those kind of things, again that I would say are very operational. I think those work really well. Where I've seen things kind of go off the rails and this is more sort of experimental is in some of the the the sort of again AI sort of powered workflow stuff. Again, some of it's really clear if it's got a clear sort of step, step, step Fine. But some of the things that I think are being sold out there are in no way ready for prime time and they're for such a very specific, very narrow use case, or they are only designed
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: to work in the demo. We've all we've all seen that. And that's that's a whole other that's a whole other thing. That's a you know, and again, there are
E Keathley: Sure is.
Lisa Grimm: there's some great stuff happening with a lot of these vendors and we love to see it, but there's also always gonna be some some sales nonsense that is just there to impress certain people who are never going to be involved with this down the line. So
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: that's why you always need someone like us there in the room to say, okay, that's interesting, or this is just you know, pure nonsense. So it's you know, you need to have that critical eye.
E Keathley: Meg, have you had any positive or negative experiences with AI and dams as far as making dams usable?
Meg Morrissey (she/her): yes, I've had the great privilege of turning off a baked
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): in AI feature. I think I think we hit this where it was first everyone's talking about it and no one's using it because we don't know what it is or what it can do.
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And then it's vendors promising us the world and we're trying to find funding, and then we have it and everyone's turning it off.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And then they start letting us bring our own LLMs to the table. And now you
Lisa Grimm: Mm.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): can kind of start to see it actually do things. we we turned it off because, you know, I I've never worked in a in a place where they're just doing very generic stock imagery. I've I've never worked
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): at Getty, I've never, you know, and so these basic models that they give you. baked in and they tell you, this is the only model we have. And can I bring one? You'll be able to bring one next year. Okay, talk to me next year. Because if I'm working for an airline and I have a picture of a pilot and your AI tags it with businessman.
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): I am not going to use that. That is actively harming my search.
Lisa Grimm: Yep.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And just, you know, we've got a banned keyword list. Great. It's constantly growing. And now I'm spending all my time removing inaccurate terms. Where's where's the savings there? is your Are your terms clear? Do they make sense? Are they is it clear that those were tagged by AI and can I easily change them? How easy is it for me to make those changes? And once you start getting that going and you determine what confidence level is acceptable to you, because they'll always I have yet to work with one that didn't at least let me give it a confidence percentage.
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Are you are you okay with 80% confidence? We are not. Are you okay with 90% confidence? Close, 95%. Yes, this is what I'm okay with, and that gives me two tags every hundred assets.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: What people are really going to want is what Microsoft Copilot offers, but isn't good at communicating to people. So the only AI that I've worked with that I found truly useful is Microsoft Copilot for the following reasons. SharePoint is not a dam. Meg, you know this, Lisa, you know this. I know this. We all know that SharePoint isn't a damn,
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Get the tattoo.
Lisa Grimm: Correct.
E Keathley: but people are confident that it is and they're using it that way.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm-hmm.
Lisa Grimm: Ha
E Keathley: The only way that you can navigate across the entire Microsoft 365 suite now is if you turn on Copilot and you enable it to go across the entire organization's Microsoft applications. And there are security reasons why people turn that off. There are still some real problems with copilot, but I do think it is the most useful of the current commercial off-the-shelf things that are being called AI right now because it kind of enables search across Word, across Excel, across SharePoint, because it can pick out words from all those different things if you've allowed it to,
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
E Keathley: and actually like create a meaningful search across Microsoft products for the first time in large organizations. Now,
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
E Keathley: that being said, where Microsoft Copilot messes up. Is that people ask it questions that are out of scope. So
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm.
E Keathley: Lisa and I talked
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm-hmm.
E Keathley: about on a previous episode about staffing. If you ask Copilot how much does position X make, it's gonna give you an answer based on text that were 10 years old, 15 years old. It's it's not crawling the web because it's crawling your internal documents. And staffing may not be in there, so it's gonna make up an answer. based on outdated information. And that's the
Lisa Grimm: Mm.
E Keathley: problem with Copilot. Copilot will be give you confidently good information about things that are in your Microsoft Office suite. But if you ask it for something that's outside scope, it's going to give you an answer that's wrong. So
Meg Morrissey (she/her): It's gonna look just as confident.
E Keathley: and it's going to look just as confident. And that's where the problem comes in. So I think that
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah, but
E Keathley: the to me the best use of AI in DAM is going to be an agent that pops up in the corner and you say, and it's it's just replacing what search is now. It's what search I think might become. Where you're asking this LLM, because we know it's not AI, but it's gonna ask the AI what we're gonna call an AI agent, informed
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm-hmm.
E Keathley: on something that an agentic engineer has put in for your collection, for your keywords, Meg, that that list is constantly updated that you talked about.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm-hmm.
E Keathley: show me all the aircraft on this field and then it's gonna crawl through all the documents, find everything related to that airport and bring it back for you. Like that's the search experience people are going to be trained to want.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm-hmm.
E Keathley: but that's not really an AI. It's just a different form of LLM search. And I think
Meg Morrissey (she/her): yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yes. Yeah.
E Keathley: that's gonna be useful in DAM more than any of these other auto tagging tools or even auto caption tools, which we then have to go back and hand correct as humans.
Lisa Grimm: Sure.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And it it really kills me that so many vendors are touting this and so many organizations and dam teams and leadership are clamoring for AI when they haven't been using the automation tools that are already there. How many how many
E Keathley: No, they're not. Yes.
Lisa Grimm: This
Meg Morrissey (she/her): DAMs want to give you auto tagging based on Microsoft Azure, but don't have synonym capability? There's no
Lisa Grimm: Right. Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): if then. There's
E Keathley: SEO that existed for more than a decade. Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And it's it's so basic. I just want you to, I'm gonna give you an aircraft and I want you to put the following keywords in that are also things that people type in for that aircraft. I want a good NLP so that people can search using what makes sense to them and still get
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): the right thing. I don't need fancy AI. Like I I don't I don't even need object recognition, really. Because it's not as helpful unless I'm already training it on things that I've create, you know, it if I can train it on the manually cataloged assets that are beautiful and gorgeous and have everything they're supposed to have that took six months to create. Okay, this is going to be much more helpful. But like at its base, just just do clean OCR, do things based on my file naming convention, rename my files based on the metadata that's in there. Flag for me what people are always searching. Give me, give me recommendations. That's not AI.
E Keathley: Meg, are you under N D A? Can you say what airline you worked for? 'Cause I'll tell you which one I worked for 'cause I'm not under a DA about it.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): I mean it's in my LinkedIn profile. So, you know,
E Keathley: Okay. All right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): I I worked for United Airlines.
E Keathley: I did I did the first metadata dictionary for Delta. So you did United, I
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Nice.
E Keathley: did Delta. We should find the person who did American.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Definitely.
Lisa Grimm: my gosh, that would be amazing.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): I mean the the archivists for air for different airlines all talk to each other and have like a cute little conference. But yes, it's
Lisa Grimm: Hmm.
E Keathley: yeah. They do. Yeah. And the Delta I think they held it at the Delta Museum the last year down in Atlanta.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah. It's and you know, Delta's really investing in in their their history and not every Southwest is doing a great job too. Not every not every airline is investing in the way that we would expect or enjoy. Anyway.
E Keathley: Well they got some yeah. It's a whole other
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: discussion. We can have a sidebar about about airline
Lisa Grimm: definitely.
E Keathley: archives. But man, that is some good work if you can get it. So anybody
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
E Keathley: out there looking for work, learn how to catalog different looking airplanes.
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha
Meg Morrissey (she/her): It's I mean the our cataloger, like the cataloger where I was working, she is I brought her in because she'd worked with me at a different company and she was so good and so kind and so like helpful. Just I saw this gap. So I
E Keathley: Jen Tiner who did the Delta work with me is at progressive insurance has she's been at progressive insurance I think a decade now. But it was me and
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm-hmm.
Lisa Grimm: Long time now, yeah.
E Keathley: Jen Tiner did Delta. Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah. Yeah. you know, finding finding her finding the records manager. This is another hot tip for when you're launching a dam.
Lisa Grimm: Yes.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Go into the directory and find the records manager and make friends with them because their work will impact your work. And if you get like I did in one organization, you end up getting a box sometimes. And this stuff used to I mean now it's in It's online, but but the stuff from before isn't, so here's the box. And I know you're gonna need this box. And I got several boxes, as it turns out.
E Keathley: have worked with exactly one organization where they had REM, which is records management, which is the compliance records,
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Lisa Grimm: Mm.
E Keathley: knowledge management, which was
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm-hmm.
E Keathley: the library and the dam
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
E Keathley: and data governance and the archives all in one under one department head on the same floor. And it was beautiful. It was beautiful. It lasted, it was,
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Okay. Wow.
Lisa Grimm: wow. that's amazing.
E Keathley: it was working. We were clicking along and they came and they took it apart.
Lisa Grimm: huh.
E Keathley: and
Meg Morrissey (she/her): They love a reorg.
E Keathley: I yeah, it was
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: a reorg and I it broke my heart because it was I was like, this is the way it should be. And like all of us that were working together was like, Man, we got it going. We got the library on the front end with the cataloging the current things that are going on. We got them rolling things into the legal compliance into RIM that's going. And if it needs to stay long long term, we've got this archive and man, they're just the top of the profession, some of the people that were in that thing, and we had it kicking along, and I have no idea why that organization decided to re-orgit. I think it was because the dam was so expensive. And they didn't
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah, priorities.
E Keathley: understand that the dam belonged there. And we can't and they were like, well that's IT. That's IT. That's IT. And we're like, yes,
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm.
E Keathley: I work with IT daily. But that's not what we're doing.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah. Yeah. Somebody running
E Keathley: And you need to have us all sitting together so we can talk because being able to talk just just having the cubes lined up that way was incredible.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm-hmm.
E Keathley: Well, the cubes and the door to the archive 'cause they were climate controlled, but it was incredible. And
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
E Keathley: I hope to see that happen across the industry. But the fact that the one place where it happened, it got dismantled still kind of blows my mind.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): You could have a a whole episode about where the damn lives in an organization. It's
Lisa Grimm: absolutely. Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): they kept
E Keathley: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): asking me at one one one place where we started out in, I started out in creative services, and it very quickly ballooned. Like very
E Keathley: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): quickly ballooned. Our use cases ballooned, everyone was knocking on our door, and we were building out processes that were supporting the entire company. We went enterprise.
E Keathley: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): We went from fifty beta users to over 8,000 users in two years. And we
Lisa Grimm: wow. Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): we should not creative services shouldn't be footing the bill for that. And that conversation of well where where do we put you? And we don't put you in IT because that's not how IT works. you know, you're you're actually doing business administration as well, so you can't be in IT. And you can't really, you shouldn't be in creative services. And I said, You're a massive organization who has the capability to do this. You need an asset management vertical. You have pieces all over the company. People were contacting me going, I hear you're working on X Dam at you know at this organization. I was like, No, I'm not. There's two other dams. And
Lisa Grimm: gosh.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): None of us are talking to each other. And when the workflow is the photographer creates the asset, the team that needs to put it on an app or something online goes into your dam, downloads it, uploads it into another dam, adds new metadata, flips a switch to push it into the CMS, goes into the CMS, adds more metadata. And then lets the tech team know it's ready for staging, you've got some problems there. you know, your tech stack isn't precious, your users are. So
Lisa Grimm: Yes.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): having having things that talk to each other is very important. And having people talk
Lisa Grimm: Yes.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): to each other before you buy a product is very important.
Lisa Grimm: Yes, please.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): I worked in a company where they were standing up a dam. And about two months after they signed Inc., they they hired someone to do a custom brand portal.
E Keathley: Okay. Well that's a choice. I mean I just wish I I really
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yep. Yep. They didn't talk to each other.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. Of course.
E Keathley: wish we could, you know, through this podcast
Meg Morrissey (she/her): I mean that was a while ago.
E Keathley: and other places continue to spread the word that maybe you hire the digital asset manager before you buy the system.
Lisa Grimm: Yes, please.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yes.
Lisa Grimm: my gosh. Yes, top tip. I feel like if there's one takeaway for everyone, it's probably that. Yeah.
E Keathley: Please, please hire the digital asset manager before you buy the system. I had someone contact me this week and they didn't understand why they weren't getting the candidates that they wanted for a job that was back on the East Coast. I'm in Portland now. So I'm kind of I'm not in the market for anything where I have to go into the office, you know, back in Atlanta anymore. And I had someone contact me and they were like company just signed this deal with this company with this with this damn vendor and now we can't find anybody who wants to work for us. And I was like, okay, well what vendor was it? And the minute they told me the vendor's name. The minute they told me the vendor's name, you l Lisa
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha We'll know we'll know but
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
E Keathley: knows who like the minute like I just closed my eyes and Lisa went, I know who it was.
Lisa Grimm: Yep.
E Keathley: the minute they said the vendor's name, I was like, well, your problem is that you signed with with vendor X and no one wants to go work with that system in that market. And they were like, Well that but there's all these people in New York use this system and all this other people use this system and I don't understand. I was like, Okay, but can you get out of it? And they were like, No, we can't get out of
Lisa Grimm: 'Cause the wrong people are buying it. Yeah.
E Keathley: it. You know, 'cause they're their their bosses aren't gonna admit they made a mistake.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm-hmm.
Lisa Grimm: Right.
E Keathley: And you haven't loaded the first asset. You know?
Lisa Grimm: Exactly that.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): This is the time. This is the time to change it. Right here.
E Keathley: They well, how much how much ego and hubris are we going to go after in the C suite to admit that
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: you just spent a year on an RFP, chose the wrong system, and now you can't hire anybody to work in it?
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah, how
Lisa Grimm: Mm.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): how much money are you willing to trade for your pride? How much is that worth to
Lisa Grimm: this is it.
E Keathley: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): you?
E Keathley: Yeah. All the way
Lisa Grimm: A hundred percent.
E Keathley: down. You just bought
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Because it's gonna cost.
E Keathley: an unusable dam because you can't hire anybody to load into it. And you'll they'll get somebody eventually if they offer enough money. or
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah it or
E Keathley: they'll get somebody really young who's just gonna get in there, get thrown into the deep end of the pool
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: and have a story for us later on when the cameras are off.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): It's it's gonna be,
Lisa Grimm: Definitely, definitely.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): yeah, you're gonna get a you're gonna give someone a great learning experience.
E Keathley: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yes.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And you're you're gonna you're gonna have a great case study for what it's like to migrate early on in your dam journey because it's it's going to break. And it
E Keathley: Yeah. That's exactly right. It's gonna break.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): you know, and when you're picking your dam, you mentioned this in a previous episode where you know, when you're picking a vendor. learn who you're actually going to work with because
Lisa Grimm: yes.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): the sales team is gonna be salesy and they're going to, you know, and
E Keathley: A lie to you.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): and when you need that much of a palette cleanse after a call, you don't really want to work with them. And we spend so much time with them. And are they gonna listen to us? What is their what is their support package like? Are we are we buying enough to earn a full CSM?
Lisa Grimm: Mm. Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Or are we only getting a fraction? And that you learn that the hard way. And we know to ask
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): these questions and we say, I want to talk to your implementation manager. I want to talk to a couple of CSMs. I want to know if they are willing to meet me where I am and advocate for my needs when everybody's looking at Salesforce and deciding which feature requests are going to get worked on.
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm. Hundred percent.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Can can you tell I've worked at a vendor? I'm your best and worst. Best and worst
E Keathley: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. yeah, yeah, we've all been Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): client.
E Keathley: I have actually never worked for a vendor.
Lisa Grimm: you've got to get in on it. It's it's good experience. Yeah.
E Keathley: to say like like I'm like I'm you know because Henrik's always like I'm vendor agnostic I would never but to be honest like for the right amount of money I don't care like I got paid a I got I got paid I did get paid to speak at a photo wear
Lisa Grimm: And it's great to see how the sausage is made, you know, like to get on all sides of it. Yeah. Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): It's yeah. I learned a lot.
E Keathley: conference in twenty fourteen. That's the only time a vendor's ever given me money. and I was that was actually like the most lovely experience. But you know those northern European systems just kill it. Every single time. I know.
Lisa Grimm: Hey.
E Keathley: but yeah, no, I I I you guys have both like you've worked for vendors. I haven't. maybe one day, I don't know.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Try it out if you get a chance. Nothing is more
Lisa Grimm: The circle of life.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): satisfying than telling a product team that's not how we will use it. And having them go
Lisa Grimm: Yes yes.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): back and actually change it.
Lisa Grimm: Absolutely.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Speaking with engineering teams, it's so eye-opening. It really helps you understand like what their limitations are. And when something you look at something, you go, why? Just I have two questions. Why and how dare you?
E Keathley: Why did you do that?
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha
Meg Morrissey (she/her): You you know, like, okay, well, I know this is what's happening behind the scenes. I know they're going to think this. Why do you think I need the delete button to work in some screens and not others? Why why
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): is this always the issue? Is it's the same, I want the same experience anywhere I am. However I click into that, I want the same experience. And just having that like background knowledge of They didn't they didn't test this properly. If you go back and tell them, like, hey, you didn't test it properly, you need to test on this. And is that product team gonna listen? Depends on the vendor. Kinda hard to interview for. but I mean, now I have some questions I would ask if I were if I were talking to vendors to select a dam that I never would have thought to ask before. But there are, and you guys mentioned this in a previous episode, there's some small shops that really do it right. And a big
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm.
E Keathley: They they are, yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): part of it is they help you craft what you need to get something prioritized and get the change you want.
E Keathley: Because your business matters to them. Like if that's Yeah, you do.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yes, and you need a partner. You don't you don't
Lisa Grimm: Yes.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): want just a vendor. You want a partner who will tell you the truth, even if it's a little inconvenient for them because they know the long game is you're going to stay. And you're going
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. Completely.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): to be happy and you're going to talk about it because if they're smart, they know we all talk to each other.
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And when we all go to Henry Stewart and we sit down at lunch, we talk shop. And
E Keathley: Shop is a word for it.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Shop is shop is you know, we what's what's the what's what's going on?
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. There are drinks after as well where it's, you know, after dark. So there's all sorts of all sorts of discussion. Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yes. Yes. The the the drinks start flowing and the stories come in and you want to be someone who your damn manager who's using you is saying, They're great. I love them. They're taking me out to dinner later. Ideally. They're taking me out to dinner later. Like they're amazing.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, we also like that. Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): They always have something or they'll figure it out and they'll get back to me. They care.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And not every company offers that. Some of the ones I've worked with would not be a surprise. but there are,
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha
Meg Morrissey (she/her): you know, if you've got a good team there who listens, the product may not be, you may not be their ideal persona, you may not be their ICP, but if they're willing to help you figure it out, sometimes that's worth it.
Lisa Grimm: Here, here. So I I think we'll we'll begin to wrap it up. We pr we probably gotta leave
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: it there pretty soon. But we could talk for hours and hours on all
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yes.
Lisa Grimm: of these topics. Like there's so much to dive into. But yeah, I think maybe we'll we'll leave everyone with kind of I I feel like we've already left them with kind of one really good kind of, you know, sort of parting parting tip. It's like make friends with the records manager, which is like massive, highly,
E Keathley: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: you know
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: You know, hire the damn person before you choose the damn, please. But yeah, any any other of those top tips we think, you know, do this and then you can make sure you're getting all of these other foundational elements into place.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah. Consider what it's going to be like to work with them for the next three to five years.
Lisa Grimm: Mm.
E Keathley: Consider the entire record management life cycle and consider putting that all in the same department.
Lisa Grimm: It's amazing. Living the dream.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yep.
E Keathley: Now.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And and get your users to own that dam.
Lisa Grimm: Here, here. amazing. this is beautiful. we should do this again. But Meg, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been a phenomenal discussion. I've already got ideas for kind of things we can do down the line too. So we may we may have to have you back for something else. So stay tuned, stay tuned there. But for all of those listeners, viewers, wherever you are, thank you so much. Join us again next week. We are thrilled to have you and we will see you again. Bye. and the book.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
E Keathley: Hello everyone.
Lisa Grimm: And we are thrilled to be joined by another amazing damn practitioner. This week we have Meg Borrissey. Welcome, Meg. How are you?
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Hi, I'm doing great. How are you?
Lisa Grimm: we are thrilled to have you. We're you know, I think we're we're making it work. We're we're we're getting by. There we go. So today's topic, which
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah, yeah. I think it's going great.
Lisa Grimm: is one I'm quite excited about. It's going great. One I'm quite excited about is what we're calling making dam usable. And we can get into all kinds of sort of nitty-gritty around things like user experience and and that kind of thing. But we're really gonna focus a bit more on kind of what are the kind of things that really need to be in place for your dam to be functional, not just getting to go live, but how are you actually getting value out of it? How do you know that you're actually making this work for people and that people are going to be using? it so we'll talk a bit about you know what are some of those things you must have in place whether it's again processes policies all all of that good stuff what do you have to have configured but then again how are you actually running this day to day so before we dive into the topic though throwing this over to you Meg give give an introduction to the people out there tell them a little bit about how you've ended up in this strange world with us and a little bit about your your journey along the way
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah, well, I am a librarian and taxonomist and archivist. I do I do all the things. I've been in the digital asset management space for about twelve years, thirteen years, and I started in grad school cataloging on media bin and car parts because I went to Michigan and you're legally required to work somewhere in the auto industry if you live
Lisa Grimm: That's a very good one.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): in that part of the state. and you know, since then I've been to a lot of mostly really large organizations who can afford a few full-time you know damn program members and that's been that's been really really interesting and I've kind of worn every hat. I've worked on custom dams, I've been an in-house dam manager, I've implemented, I've migrated, I've, you know, sunset, of course, and you know, I've been a consultant, I've been a vendor working with the vendors. I've worked with engineering teams, I've worked with, you know, marketing teams and everything in between. And I'm gonna toot my own horn for one thing.
Lisa Grimm: please do, yes.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): everything you see on Disney Plus goes through my system and uses the data
E Keathley: Nice.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): model that I created for automation. So
E Keathley: Nice.
Lisa Grimm: Love it.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): very satisfying to see that. and I was there when it launched and it was terrifying.
E Keathley: I bet. Was that North Plains back in the day?
Meg Morrissey (she/her): we were all in house. we worked
E Keathley: Really?
Meg Morrissey (she/her): we well, we worked with we worked with a couple of folks. That's how I got to know John Hordisky, was was through was through Disney, but we had like seventy marketing agencies around the world who we were working with and the company bought a couple of them that I I worked with primarily for designing all of all of those workflows and we had a team of about fifty on
E Keathley: And that was all out of Southern California, not Orlando, right? Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): It was in Southern California. There's a separate dam in Orlando that works with the parks.
E Keathley: Yeah, the right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yep. Yep. And I was at the studio and it was it's still one of my favorite, absolutely top three projects I've ever worked on.
E Keathley: Very cool. I don't think people realize how many digital asset managers have gone through the Orlando theme park shop. which
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
E Keathley: really should be like a damn si like we should we should do like an investigative series at some point if Lisa and I could ever get people to talk, maybe we'd have to have like blacked out, like pixelated and some like voice recognition stuff, you know. voice alteration stuff running out of there. Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): You need an alumni group.
E Keathley: We need an alumni
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: group willing to ex real where we could interview, like do like a five part like Orlando theme parks series on them and Universal and their dams. so anybody
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah, yeah, universal. Mm-hmm.
E Keathley: anybody who's out there who's worked in Orlando in digital asset management, if you want to do some like off the record stuff with us, we will protect your identity, which we can do.
Lisa Grimm: A hundred per cent. Yeah?
E Keathley: because we're we're talking today about making damn usable, but by the time this comes out, Lisa and I will be ready to launch the new damn salary survey. so be on
Lisa Grimm: Coming back.
E Keathley: the lookout for that
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yes.
E Keathley: on LinkedIn. But to get into making damn usable, we we have a lot of stuff in this chapter of the book about ACLs, about user interface, about kits, collections, all kind of stuff. Lisa, where where should we start?
Lisa Grimm: That's that's the funny thing. Like it's it's hard to know where to start, but I think, Meg, your introduction is is
E Keathley: Ha ha ha.
Lisa Grimm: so helpful because like like you, we've all been kind of on almost every side of the equation. Like, you know, like you say, either in-house or with the vendor or with a system integrator. And I feel like depending on which of those you're in, you start in very different places and the solutions you might be given as kind of the person or the team gonna be who are gonna be owning the dam may be kind of at odds with with you know, with each other and kind of what if you like, what order of operations to To attack those things in. So I think I I think it'd just be good to kind of get some perspective on where do you is there a right place to start? And obviously it's gonna vary from project to project, but what do you think are are some of those non-negotiables you need in order to get to that sort of, you know, we can take the box, we can go live, we've got the basics in place to to kind of get us over the line and then build from there. So what's what's a good what's your what what are some of your top tips for that?
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Ooh. A system, a damn team, preferably
Lisa Grimm: That helps, yes.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): led by one person, not five
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): people who are going to devote a
E Keathley: Ha
Meg Morrissey (she/her): few hours a month and all work together to cover it. Please, please, please,
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): one person where the buck stops, one person who is responsible for that relationship with your vendor. one person who can say, yes, this supports it, no, this doesn't, hold me accountable for the timeline. I've worked in
E Keathley: And that's a hundred percent of their job.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, exactly.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yes, that would be that would be fantastic if we could get out of, well, they're gonna spend, we've got like 20 hours a week where where we can play with this. There's there's red flags there. And I know they're gonna be bringing me in later.
E Keathley: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: exactly. Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): yes, so that's that's my if you leave with one thing, have one person who is running the show. I've worked in a place where there were two, one involved with tech, one in product, and they jointly,
Lisa Grimm: Mm.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): there's nobody to take responsibility for four things, like for the timeline, for all of it. There's no way to prioritize across that if you've got those two things at at the same level. so that's that's number one and two and three.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): I would say number four is a metadata model, the scaffolding.
Lisa Grimm: Here, here.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): of a metadata model where it is it's a living thing, making sure that it's there s yeah.
E Keathley: Yeah, and I wanna add on, when we're talking about metadata modeling, I had a contract in the last few years, in the last decade, where I came before I came in, before I took the job, they said, and don't worry, we already have a framework of a metadata model for you to to get off and and running with. And I was like, Fantastic, we have a place to start. And I got there and it was exclusively technical metadata. It was there was no descriptive metadata that had been done.
Lisa Grimm: fantastic.
E Keathley: There was no administrative metadata that had been done.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm.
Lisa Grimm: my god. Delightful.
E Keathley: so they had one of the three types of metadata. One. And they thought they were done.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Ready to run.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: And they thought they were done. They were like, it's no, no, no, no. We're we're we got we got it set up with the vendor. We did it right away. And I got it and went, no, no.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): no. Not good. Not what you want. And I've never picked up a metadata
E Keathley: They didn't know.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): model that was ready to go. It never picked
E Keathley: Yeah, no. Well it
Lisa Grimm: yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): up a metadata model. No one's ever handed me one that was actually ready for prime time. but you're
E Keathley: Well, and everybody everybody on this call knows that your first twenty thousand assets or so you're gonna reload them like three times if you're starting from ground zero. Like you're gonna reload them three times because the gap between theory and practice, between what you think, how you think users are gonna use the system and how it turns out users actually encounter that system and experience it is gonna be different. And you can do every focus group in the world and the users can say, we're gonna do this, this and this but then when this system actually rolls out you know, after those first ninety days you're gonna have to come in, reload everything and make profound changes to the descriptive metadata.
Lisa Grimm: Hundred percent. Yeah. I I'm feeling that now. I'm in UAT and we're already getting that feedback of, you know, we had something but again we knew this was gonna happen, so we've built in time, which is the way to
E Keathley: That's that's just how it that is
Lisa Grimm: do it. Yeah.
E Keathley: just how it goes. That's not a mistake. That's just yeah, it's just part of the process. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Exactly. No, it's part of the process. And I think that's important. Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, a hundred
Meg Morrissey (she/her): I
Lisa Grimm: percent. Yeah. Sorry, go on, Meg, yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah. well you only get one first impression. So, and that takes a lot of work to come back from. And I've made the mistake of, well, we we have some things that we really just can we just get them in now and they can be browse only, and then you know, we'll enhance them later, and that way they'll have quick, secure access to these things as they come in. And I made the mistake of saying yes. And That group, which was a core user group, you know, said we can't find half of what we're looking for. I type something in the top bar and it's not there. It doesn't matter
E Keathley: Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): that they asked me for browse only. That's that's gone. That's not a valid response, is well, you you said you wanted browse only because those aren't the people who made the decision for browse only.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Their managers are the people who made the decision for browse only. All they know is there's a dam. And they can't find what they need.
E Keathley: My my most successful strategy for that so far has been when you come in, because you're you know, part of the job is breaking down information silos to make the dam usable. You're facilitating these these this discovery across groups so that people can find things that other people were doing that they didn't even know they had, you know, to prevent duplicate work, all the good things that we talk about, damn. But my most successful strategy so far is that when I come in, I go around to all the different groups. And I say, what is one thing that you want to share? Just one. And then I tell all the groups, everybody's gonna share one thing so that you can see how it works and we can talk about how this process is gonna go. And then when we kind of do that soft launch, you know, after 90 days or six months or, you know, however long it took to get there for everybody to give me one thing, bring everybody back in and say, All of these groups, these nine groups, these ten groups, these 24 groups, have each given me one asset so you guys can see what this looks like. Now let's all talk about what we do and don't like about the way it's working right now. And I just make it really, really clear. We're not doing a soft launch with browse only. We're it's
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
E Keathley: full functionality, but right now we all understand this is a test. And we're not this is in no way complete. And because every single group has given me one thing, they understand there's just one thing from every group in there. And then we can
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
E Keathley: move forward from that. But I've been in that position where they're like, No, no, no, just get just get this in, just get this campaign in, just this campaign. And it's yeah, it's you're right, Meg. It's kind of a disaster.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah, and it's it it's impossible to come back from. And even as you're enhancing the metadata, they're not gonna come back a week later and look for the same thing.
Lisa Grimm: Right.
E Keathley: No. Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): so so coming back, you know, getting that better and better and then reintroducing it was the only thing that worked for us was okay, well you're beta testers, you get early access, you're welcome, congratulations. It's not perfect. We're going to be asking you what's not perfect as we go through. And you're going to get to see, you're going to get to own it. And that's something that helps so much with adoption and just general change management. Is this was made by you, you know, by me, with you, for you. And
E Keathley: Well, and you can also Yeah, and you can also create some FOMO. You can also, when you're
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yes.
E Keathley: doing those test those test things, one thing I like to do again, like I'm giving away all my little tricks here, but the people that are gonna
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Writing doom.
E Keathley: see it, like it's it's only people that are in our industry are gonna see this. Like peop it's not gonna damage my stuff later on. But like when
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: we're when you're doing those test groups and you just have like that one thing from everybody, you include them in on a secret, which is that we're not letting everybody see this yet. This is just for you
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, yeah.
E Keathley: because we understand that you, the person who's gonna own it later, is special and you get this special advanced access. We're not gonna show everybody any of anything. And if they're really super into it and they actually like s show interest and they seem like they're getting excited, I'll be like, by the way, you know, if if they want to do that, if I like feel like I've kind of like got the carrot going, I'll be like, and since you're extra special because you understand what we're doing. I'm gonna show you what it could look like later. And then they're excited about it because you've given them, you know, a kind of like a backstage pass. Like you've made it a little bit more special for them. So then they have more buy-in. And giving and doing that one or two assets in the beginning to give them something to show off to their group, that also like creates more of a feeling of that ownership that you're talking about, Meg.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah, yeah. I think that, you know, I ideally before they pick the system, they have that one person in place and they know they know why they need it. That's another piece that's so important.
E Keathley: Ha ha ha
Lisa Grimm: We Yes, we all wish. Yeah, I know.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Why do you actually need this? I I know, you know, you're
E Keathley: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): you're getting out of OneDrive. Great, but why do you need this? What is your mission? And how can your dam program support your mission? Tell me what your priorities are. Tell me your strategic initiatives for this year. Tell me what's coming up that I can make us indispensable for. Let me help you get your bonus this year. And
E Keathley: Yeah. And that's
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. That's a great one. Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): yes, and keeping keeping that going, keeping that conversation with leadership going, of giving them a sneak peek once it's basically once it's ready, but giving them a a sneak peek of, okay, we have this new workflow. We've kicked the tires, we're ready, you know, we've we've got stuff in and we're about to announce it. We're gonna show it to you first and we're gonna get your feedback, which is usually just it's great, we love it. but give them an opportunity for feedback and and really get them excited because a lot of organizations, with a few exceptions, which have been honestly very difficult, they are, you know, it's it's hierarchical. It's a it's a vertical
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): org. And once you have that leadership buy-in, that permission for someone to test it and to give you their time, because that is such people being generous with their time and telling you what they do and how they do it and testing it for you and searching for the best assets to provide you, that takes time out of their their regular job. And without leadership giving them permission and saying, okay, I know one of your projects this week is helping with the dam. And we're gonna count that as one of the things that you're doing this week, versus not having that leadership visibility because they are being generous with their time. This takes up, this is labor on their part as well.
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And if they don't feel that they have permission to spend that time, They're just gonna say, no, I have too many projects. Can we do this in a month? I don't have the time for a meeting. you know, I had to cancel this, so sorry. I'll get it to you soon. I just have to finish this big project. And before you know it, your two-month launch is now six months. And you don't have control
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): over that, but you can head that off with getting that, getting that buy-in all the way, all the way up the chain, getting that buy-in. And specifically saying, okay, this is gonna take up time. Give me three people on your team who you can take five hours a week for the next couple of weeks of digging through things, or more realistically, two hours. You're never gonna get more than two hours from
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): from someone in a in a given week. So choose wisely where that's going. Expensive meetings. Do we need every single person in the room? and getting that relationship going, you know, like you said, going to each of these groups, getting that relationship going, getting them excited, and also showing their leadership what we can do quickly and being really, really efficient with their time. Like I prioritize ruthlessly if I've got a call with anyone, honestly, because they're gonna stop showing up. And I know we're gonna talk about governance, but that is a big piece of governance. Is it's
Lisa Grimm: Hundred percent.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): not sexy. And one of the ways to get people in is to just be really efficient. And if you can cancel the meeting, cancel the meeting. People love a magical free hour of their time. and
Lisa Grimm: It's true.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): you know, really really meeting them where they are. But so you need and you need those use cases. You get those use cases, you learn about their entire asset life cycle. You talk to ideally you talk to the photographers if you're doing photography. You talk to the people who are making those 3D models that you're going to be storing. And you you talk to whoever is creating things or you talk to the designers, you talk to whoever you can to understand What are they making? Why are they making it? What do they know about it right now? How can I get that in so that my metadata is as far up the chain as possible in that life cycle? And how can I keep it going? How can I get that file name? That sweet, sweet file name that actually
Lisa Grimm: Yes. Keep this character limit, but also has all of these meaningful pieces and parts to it. Yes.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And it's it's another one where you need scaffolding. Because you need
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm, exactly.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): you need your file name to be foolproof if you're going to, and someone, someone in the supply chain is always going to build automation off of your file name. It might be you,
E Keathley: Yeah, I
Lisa Grimm: Absolutely.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): it might be somebody else, someone is going to do it.
E Keathley: Yeah. There was during one of my maternity leaves, I had a vendor convince a client that file names didn't matter.
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha
Meg Morrissey (she/her): I just
E Keathley: And I came back from maternity leave and a manager sat me down and said, While you were gone, because I that was like one of their things, like while I was gone, while I'm while I'm gone, please come up with a naming convention. I came back and they were like, Listen, we just decided that since we had unique IDs on the assets, we we're not gonna force a naming convention. And I
Lisa Grimm: God.
E Keathley: looked directly at the manager and I said, I understand the decision's been made. I understand the way that you're telling me that it's been made, that this ship has sailed. But I want you to know that in the next couple of years you're gonna come back to me and you're gonna tell me I was right. And I'm never gonna talk about it again. And we both she like basically
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha.
E Keathley: was like, Fine. And sure enough, like about two years later she sat down with me for lunch and was like, Hey, so
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yep. You know,
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): it's you're building your own pipeline for future work. Why they do that?
E Keathley: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yes.
E Keathley: I mean I dun I don't know what to tell you, man.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): It yes. I and making metadata, making governance sexy
E Keathley: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): is such a specific skill and not enough people have it. I think I'm about fifty percent of where I want to be. There is an executive at Disney. sorry. There's an executive in a company I worked for. Big company. Yeah. Yes.
E Keathley: Hold on. Let's give Lisa a clean edit. Can you back up and start over?
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yes. making it sexy is difficult. I once had the good fortune to work with an executive who knew how to do that, who could go to a lunch and come back with resources and buy-in for a metadata specific project.
Lisa Grimm: We love it.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And to be a fly on
E Keathley: Nice.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): that wall, I would have paid money. To do that. And all all
Lisa Grimm: Amazing.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): I got out of him was it doesn't matter what you think is important. It only matters
Lisa Grimm: Hmm.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): what they think is important. And
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): if you can make your goals align with theirs in a way that gives them the flashy bits. My work isn't flashy, my work makes your flashy possible. And all I need is this to get it done.
E Keathley: Meg, do you ever have a tough time explaining to your clients the difference between the back end of the dam and the user interface?
Meg Morrissey (she/her): had a lot of I haven't had clients who've had a had a had trouble with it. I mean I I describe it as a restaurant. in in the back end we
E Keathley: That's a good that's a good analogy. Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): are we are not just cooking it we are you know we're we're adding things to it We have our workflow. I've worked in enough restaurants, you know, you have your expo, you have who I is kind of your damn manager. Well, the manager, I guess, is the damn manager. But the expo is definitely someone who is for the uninitiated, uninitiated, waiting by the kitchen where they put out the food, ready to make sure this order has three of its four dishes. Where is this one? This one is ready to go, flagging the server, making sure that this Food gets to you hot and correctly. And that's what the dam does is our users are sitting in the dining room, they've ordered and they expect something specific when they order that. And if you give them something else, they're gonna send it back. And maybe they won't
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): come back to your restaurant if they're not getting what they expected.
Lisa Grimm: my god, a hundred percent. And I think it you said something in there too that was was so important about, you know, obviously there's there's the making the governance sexy or or you're trying your best to do that. But I think, you know, some of these things are so fundamental and they can get, you know, sort of hand waved away, like you know, talking about naming conventions. I'm working on something right now where one of the things I'm doing before we go live is literally just documenting every single, you know, naming convention approach, what what does this go for you know, what what kind of asset does this apply to, you know, what's the what's the kind of use case, all these things. But, you know, it's so important as a part of governance to have these kind of living and updated, you know, playbooks and, you know, all
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yes.
Lisa Grimm: of these sort of references to policies and procedures. And especially as you get into these really complex stacks where, like you said, there might be automation happening so far downstream, you have no idea that this is even, you know, being consumed somewhere. So unless you have documented, again, the data flows across your whole system. What's the system of record for this kind of metadata versus that kind of metadata?
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm-hmm.
Lisa Grimm: Like it it just becomes absolutely untenable if, you know, the one person who knows X or Y about a system leaves. And so I feel like you you can't tick that go live box or that upgrade box or whatever you want to call it until you've done that behind the scenes stuff that's not even necessarily in the dam. It's just documentation, it's policies, it's procedures, it's who owns What? It's putting together all of those people who sit on, you know, your data council or, you know, whatever and making that, like you said, interesting to people. Like, how do you get them to kind of come back for it? And it's it's a real it's a real challenge. And I think it's one of these things that people don't realize is kind of like so much a part of what we do is, you know, really aligning the all these sort of different strategic elements behind the scenes. But it's You know, 'cause it's it's easy enough to think this is a technology project. These are never technology projects. We know that. There's technology, but it's people, it's processes.
E Keathley: Ha ha ha.
Lisa Grimm: And
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: how do we say this is where you want to spend your time? It's talking to people, getting them to interact with it, getting them to understand too that this isn't a photo library they're getting. That might be what they've been kind of sold by sort of executives.
E Keathley: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm-hmm.
Lisa Grimm: This is again something that is strategic, that is moving things, doing things to things, transforming things across the system and that's gonna change the way they work and how do you get them out of kind of the vision that maybe they were sold by you know maybe internal management who didn't kind of know what the quite they were looking for versus kind of where you were like, like you said I understand what you're trying to do. How can I help you get there? And that's I think the
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm-hmm.
Lisa Grimm: secret sauce.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
E Keathley: I would really I would really encourage everybody who's having that struggle, Lisa, to go read some pieces on data governance and just start using that language because the field of data
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: governance, while it comes from a different information science sort of lineage than librarianship, it's got the buzzwords that the MBAs are going to respond to right now. So data governance, data lineage, which is we were all trained to call provenance. Nobody knows what provenance is. If you say respect dead spons, people
Lisa Grimm: Right.
E Keathley: look like you're an alien. You can't do that. But if you
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
E Keathley: say data lineage, they understand that concept. And if you can like pull out some visio charts and be like, and the dam can express these relationships between the paperwork and the object, whether it's physical or digital, you know, I think that that can really be helpful in that instance.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah, yeah, and it this this comes into language. You need to speak their language. You need to understand their language when you're when you're putting together your mission statement, your scope, which comes out of your mission statement, your your metadata model, you
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): have to understand what they mean by asset. Which sometimes can be two or three different things within teams who
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): work together, which is always really interesting.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And you have to you have to ask those questions where they're gonna come out of a call and you have to have the right people, people who are game for this, saying, you know, my brain broke a little bit and I have a headache, but that was a great call.
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And you know, I could never, I would never want to do what you someone told me this and I did not know if I should be if I should feel good about it or not, but I'm choosing in hindsight to feel good about this, which was, you know, I would never, ever, ever, ever in my whole life wanna do what you do, and I'm really glad you're doing it.
Lisa Grimm: Awww.
E Keathley: I get that. I I've gotten that in every single, I think, every single contract I've ever done,
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
E Keathley: every workspace I've ever done, which is people expressing a horror that I enjoyed doing this. and
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm-hmm. Yes.
E Keathley: it's it's really interesting because you know, when I was in library school a million years ago up at Simmons, I was in an archival management class and there was someone to my right who had a bag of MMs and they were sitting there and they were sorting all the MMs by color before they ate them. And I was like, I do that. And then another person right behind me said, yeah, I do that too. And I just looked around at the classroom and I just asked because we were waiting for the professor to get there. They were a little bit late or something. I said, How many of us in here sort our candy by color before we ate? And like Yeah, like everybody in the room. And then like one guy who's over in the corner is like, I don't know what's wrong with you people. And I wonder if that
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha.
E Keathley: person is still in the field. Like
Lisa Grimm: Right. It is so library school coded. Amazing.
E Keathley: It's enjoyable. I know.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): It really information professionals, we are we like things neat and tidy. and and I hope we continue to do so because all of our labor that is absolutely invisible to our end users is so important to their experience. I always tell them, like, my goal, I know these meetings are breaking your brain. We have to have the hard meetings right now so that when when our end users look at our system, they think this is really freaking easy. I could have done this. Of course this
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): goes here. Of course this is what comes up when I type it. you know, this this weird phrase, this acronym. good lord, the initialisms
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): and the acronyms that come with every company. The first thing I do when I enter an organization is is I source out if someone already has one, because there's usually someone on the team who
E Keathley: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): you want to know who has their own little glossary. And then I can because I always start building one. What does that mean? AO means airport operations? There was no way I was going to get that on my own. Not to mention all the department names. but but going back to what you need to have in place, your mission statement, your buy-in, all of your good clean use cases that go holistically through the entire, ideally the entire asset lifecycle, but when you're first starting out, at least to your beta testers where they're using it and how they're using it. Get at least that far. Your documentation, which we we touched on a little bit, but having all of that, having things written down so that as all of this is changing and you're iterating as you're learning, you remember why you did the thing that now makes no sense. And
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): you can document why it makes no sense and what you're doing instead, because six months from now someone's gonna want to change it back. And your training. You have to understand
E Keathley: Well and if
Meg Morrissey (she/her): how to use it. And it's usually really simple at the beginning because you don't have that many features at the beginning. You don't
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): have that many workflows. But
E Keathley: Well, y you know, I've gotten pushback on the fact that I call myself an information scientist, but the fact of the matter is that what we're doing is information science and the root of all science is if you didn't record it, if you didn't write it down somewhere somehow, then it's not science. Like science is just documenting the things, right? Like, you know, to go into the the natural science, you know, if s when someone discovers a new snail or whatever, well the snail's al always been there. But it wasn't science until somebody wrote it down, right? And documented what that snail's doing and where it lives and what it eats and the whole thing. That's science. And when we're talking about information science, all these assets exist independently whether or not we're organizing them and creating access to them, arranging, describing, creating access to and preserving these things or not. They exist.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm-hmm.
E Keathley: But it becomes information science when we add in that structure and that documentation. And that's why we deserve to be paid like scientists. Because what we're doing is information science. We're putting in all of these layers that are continuing they're going to continue to make these assets usable, you know, which is the whole point of the dam. If it's used, it's usable. And so what we have to do is layer in all of this metadata, all of this expertise that we as consultants bring to the table so that the digital asset management system has been worth the investment in time and money.
Lisa Grimm: Here, here.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah. Garbage in, garbage out. and
E Keathley: Yeah, for sure.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): and I heard a now, this is a fictional person, but it was really beautifully written, so I'm going to I'm going to quote it. an at a theoretical physicist who waxed poetic on the importance of pencils.
E Keathley: Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Because nothing exists until you write it down.
E Keathley: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And observing And documenting, as you said, is science.
E Keathley: Well it exists, but who knows about it?
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yes.
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yes. If if if a fifty thousand dollar photo shoot is sitting in a desk drawer
Lisa Grimm: Anyway
Meg Morrissey (she/her): on a drive, does it exist?
E Keathley: Hey, remember when
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: fifty thousand dollars was a lot of money?
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah. I do.
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha. Yeah. And then
Meg Morrissey (she/her): In a minute.
Lisa Grimm: again you go back to change management. It's all part of it. Like, you know, your
E Keathley: Right.
Lisa Grimm: vendors aren't gonna start magically delivering things to your dam unless you've told them this change is coming. And you know, again, we we can talk about You know, th we'll we'll probably talk a bit more about change management in in another episode. But I think again, it's part and parcel of the sort of you know, it you know, it never stops changing. So you're always, you know, making sure you're continuing to socialize these things, explaining to people again and again, because they won't hear you the first time, or maybe even the fifth time, or the twentieth time, that this is not a project, this is a program, this is something that's
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: going to be continuously running. And again, that's why you need a person who is the ultimate y you know, arbiter of actually making things happen. It doesn't work when it's, you know, we're gonna have, you know, three people do X or Y part time because again, it's it's not just about the tagging, it's about all these strategic, you know, pieces. And, you know, ideally you've
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: got, you know You're a kind of product owner, but then you have a team who can do some of these other operational tasks, but you need someone to make the decisions and to just, you know, evolve
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yes.
Lisa Grimm: it. And, you know, otherwise y you know, you can have the best vendor in the world, maybe it's even a great fit and you got to be there, you know, choosing that vendor at the beginning. But unless someone is driving that continuously, it just it is going to sort of die a death. So
E Keathley: Well and succession
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yes.
E Keathley: and succession management. You know, one of the great gifts that the recent AI hype turmoil has given us over the last two years is that the layoffs and the retirements were so dramatic and so extreme that the change management and the succession management to both of your points about there's somebody who knows where things are, right? Well, they don't live here anymore.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yep. Yep.
E Keathley: And there's going to be a lot of work for all three of us figuring out, you know, loss of institutional knowledge as to where the files are and what exactly happened. I really think that the next I'd say five to ten years of work that the three of us are gonna have is gonna be coming in and cleaning up over after the dramatic staff cuts that have happened over the last two years where people thought that AI could come in and do these jobs. And to be fair, they were sold that, right? Vendors sold them this promise of
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
E Keathley: people replacement. That's not actually really gonna happen in a lot
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
E Keathley: of ways. They're gonna have to come back and rehire. And they're probably gonna have to hire one of us or one of our other fellow podcast guests to come in and clean up some mess.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah, AI is the new offshoring.
Lisa Grimm: Yes.
E Keathley: Yeah, that's that's very true. Some of it's gonna work, some of it's not.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And and it is i there's you know, I've been asked that question, you know, when I'm managing a team and someone is leaving. Okay, well, we need to backfill, so let's, you know, let's start the hiring process. Ideally, we give them a few days together, a week or two together, so there is a knowledge transfer versus me trying to remember everything and then teaching it to someone else when I mostly understood what they were doing.
E Keathley: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): You know, I'm I delegate. I delegate well.
E Keathley: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Which means I might not know precisely how they do that thing that they're doing twice a week that I didn't know they were doing, but as it's doing.
Lisa Grimm: No.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): and and they tell you, well, you know, we're we're looking at this AI tool, it's part of a larger initiative. Could we instead go with like a 40 hours a month contractor? And then, you know, you'll have this AI tool once you implement it. So I have fewer staff to implement it. and I will forever have fewer staff members to make sure that what goes into your AI tool gives you the correct answers. I heard recently, you know, it's not gonna tell you it doesn't know. It's going
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): to give you the wrong answer and give it to you quickly and confidently. And you get to deal
E Keathley: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): with the fallout.
E Keathley: And we've Lisa and I have discussed with previous guests how the the tools that do work, the large language model tools that do work, which are being marketed as AI, have been native to
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yes.
E Keathley: Dam for a while. Lisa, what are some of the best ones that you've worked with?
Lisa Grimm: I th I think if if we're talking about just kind of features and functionality, I do think there are some useful AI agents you can turn on in and and again, like you say, is it really AI? It it's kind of it sort of doesn't matter, although it does mean you can pay for
E Keathley: It just moot, I guess. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: AI credits when it comes to like who's paying for it, that's where it, you know, becomes important
E Keathley: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: to track what's what. But I do think you know, in in as much as a lot of that kind of automated metadata tagging is Still kind of messy and still kind of basic. And obviously you still need a ton of governance so you don't just create noise. There are
E Keathley: Mm.
Lisa Grimm: some really nice tools that you you can feed it sort of on a model. Like like what one good example is to say, I want alt text on every image. It should follow this standard, and then it can go and do that at scale. So you're giving it a very
E Keathley: Yeah. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: clear, you know, sort of prescription, if you like to say, go off and do. Fantastic. Then you've got your accessibility figured out, you've got something basic for all of them, and it can go off and Yeah, you can happily do that. Well, is it happy who who can say? That's a whole other philosophical question. So but
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: there's things like that that can work really well where it's got guardrails, you know what model it's using, you know what information you've fed it, you can kind of you know, really kind of keep on on top of that. So those kind of things, again that I would say are very operational. I think those work really well. Where I've seen things kind of go off the rails and this is more sort of experimental is in some of the the the sort of again AI sort of powered workflow stuff. Again, some of it's really clear if it's got a clear sort of step, step, step Fine. But some of the things that I think are being sold out there are in no way ready for prime time and they're for such a very specific, very narrow use case, or they are only designed
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: to work in the demo. We've all we've all seen that. And that's that's a whole other that's a whole other thing. That's a you know, and again, there are
E Keathley: Sure is.
Lisa Grimm: there's some great stuff happening with a lot of these vendors and we love to see it, but there's also always gonna be some some sales nonsense that is just there to impress certain people who are never going to be involved with this down the line. So
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: that's why you always need someone like us there in the room to say, okay, that's interesting, or this is just you know, pure nonsense. So it's you know, you need to have that critical eye.
E Keathley: Meg, have you had any positive or negative experiences with AI and dams as far as making dams usable?
Meg Morrissey (she/her): yes, I've had the great privilege of turning off a baked
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): in AI feature. I think I think we hit this where it was first everyone's talking about it and no one's using it because we don't know what it is or what it can do.
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And then it's vendors promising us the world and we're trying to find funding, and then we have it and everyone's turning it off.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And then they start letting us bring our own LLMs to the table. And now you
Lisa Grimm: Mm.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): can kind of start to see it actually do things. we we turned it off because, you know, I I've never worked in a in a place where they're just doing very generic stock imagery. I've I've never worked
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): at Getty, I've never, you know, and so these basic models that they give you. baked in and they tell you, this is the only model we have. And can I bring one? You'll be able to bring one next year. Okay, talk to me next year. Because if I'm working for an airline and I have a picture of a pilot and your AI tags it with businessman.
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): I am not going to use that. That is actively harming my search.
Lisa Grimm: Yep.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And just, you know, we've got a banned keyword list. Great. It's constantly growing. And now I'm spending all my time removing inaccurate terms. Where's where's the savings there? is your Are your terms clear? Do they make sense? Are they is it clear that those were tagged by AI and can I easily change them? How easy is it for me to make those changes? And once you start getting that going and you determine what confidence level is acceptable to you, because they'll always I have yet to work with one that didn't at least let me give it a confidence percentage.
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Are you are you okay with 80% confidence? We are not. Are you okay with 90% confidence? Close, 95%. Yes, this is what I'm okay with, and that gives me two tags every hundred assets.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: What people are really going to want is what Microsoft Copilot offers, but isn't good at communicating to people. So the only AI that I've worked with that I found truly useful is Microsoft Copilot for the following reasons. SharePoint is not a dam. Meg, you know this, Lisa, you know this. I know this. We all know that SharePoint isn't a damn,
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Get the tattoo.
Lisa Grimm: Correct.
E Keathley: but people are confident that it is and they're using it that way.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm-hmm.
Lisa Grimm: Ha
E Keathley: The only way that you can navigate across the entire Microsoft 365 suite now is if you turn on Copilot and you enable it to go across the entire organization's Microsoft applications. And there are security reasons why people turn that off. There are still some real problems with copilot, but I do think it is the most useful of the current commercial off-the-shelf things that are being called AI right now because it kind of enables search across Word, across Excel, across SharePoint, because it can pick out words from all those different things if you've allowed it to,
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
E Keathley: and actually like create a meaningful search across Microsoft products for the first time in large organizations. Now,
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
E Keathley: that being said, where Microsoft Copilot messes up. Is that people ask it questions that are out of scope. So
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm.
E Keathley: Lisa and I talked
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm-hmm.
E Keathley: about on a previous episode about staffing. If you ask Copilot how much does position X make, it's gonna give you an answer based on text that were 10 years old, 15 years old. It's it's not crawling the web because it's crawling your internal documents. And staffing may not be in there, so it's gonna make up an answer. based on outdated information. And that's the
Lisa Grimm: Mm.
E Keathley: problem with Copilot. Copilot will be give you confidently good information about things that are in your Microsoft Office suite. But if you ask it for something that's outside scope, it's going to give you an answer that's wrong. So
Meg Morrissey (she/her): It's gonna look just as confident.
E Keathley: and it's going to look just as confident. And that's where the problem comes in. So I think that
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah, but
E Keathley: the to me the best use of AI in DAM is going to be an agent that pops up in the corner and you say, and it's it's just replacing what search is now. It's what search I think might become. Where you're asking this LLM, because we know it's not AI, but it's gonna ask the AI what we're gonna call an AI agent, informed
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm-hmm.
E Keathley: on something that an agentic engineer has put in for your collection, for your keywords, Meg, that that list is constantly updated that you talked about.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm-hmm.
E Keathley: show me all the aircraft on this field and then it's gonna crawl through all the documents, find everything related to that airport and bring it back for you. Like that's the search experience people are going to be trained to want.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm-hmm.
E Keathley: but that's not really an AI. It's just a different form of LLM search. And I think
Meg Morrissey (she/her): yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yes. Yeah.
E Keathley: that's gonna be useful in DAM more than any of these other auto tagging tools or even auto caption tools, which we then have to go back and hand correct as humans.
Lisa Grimm: Sure.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And it it really kills me that so many vendors are touting this and so many organizations and dam teams and leadership are clamoring for AI when they haven't been using the automation tools that are already there. How many how many
E Keathley: No, they're not. Yes.
Lisa Grimm: This
Meg Morrissey (she/her): DAMs want to give you auto tagging based on Microsoft Azure, but don't have synonym capability? There's no
Lisa Grimm: Right. Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): if then. There's
E Keathley: SEO that existed for more than a decade. Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And it's it's so basic. I just want you to, I'm gonna give you an aircraft and I want you to put the following keywords in that are also things that people type in for that aircraft. I want a good NLP so that people can search using what makes sense to them and still get
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): the right thing. I don't need fancy AI. Like I I don't I don't even need object recognition, really. Because it's not as helpful unless I'm already training it on things that I've create, you know, it if I can train it on the manually cataloged assets that are beautiful and gorgeous and have everything they're supposed to have that took six months to create. Okay, this is going to be much more helpful. But like at its base, just just do clean OCR, do things based on my file naming convention, rename my files based on the metadata that's in there. Flag for me what people are always searching. Give me, give me recommendations. That's not AI.
E Keathley: Meg, are you under N D A? Can you say what airline you worked for? 'Cause I'll tell you which one I worked for 'cause I'm not under a DA about it.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): I mean it's in my LinkedIn profile. So, you know,
E Keathley: Okay. All right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): I I worked for United Airlines.
E Keathley: I did I did the first metadata dictionary for Delta. So you did United, I
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Nice.
E Keathley: did Delta. We should find the person who did American.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Definitely.
Lisa Grimm: my gosh, that would be amazing.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): I mean the the archivists for air for different airlines all talk to each other and have like a cute little conference. But yes, it's
Lisa Grimm: Hmm.
E Keathley: yeah. They do. Yeah. And the Delta I think they held it at the Delta Museum the last year down in Atlanta.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah. It's and you know, Delta's really investing in in their their history and not every Southwest is doing a great job too. Not every not every airline is investing in the way that we would expect or enjoy. Anyway.
E Keathley: Well they got some yeah. It's a whole other
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: discussion. We can have a sidebar about about airline
Lisa Grimm: definitely.
E Keathley: archives. But man, that is some good work if you can get it. So anybody
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
E Keathley: out there looking for work, learn how to catalog different looking airplanes.
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha
Meg Morrissey (she/her): It's I mean the our cataloger, like the cataloger where I was working, she is I brought her in because she'd worked with me at a different company and she was so good and so kind and so like helpful. Just I saw this gap. So I
E Keathley: Jen Tiner who did the Delta work with me is at progressive insurance has she's been at progressive insurance I think a decade now. But it was me and
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm-hmm.
Lisa Grimm: Long time now, yeah.
E Keathley: Jen Tiner did Delta. Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah. Yeah. you know, finding finding her finding the records manager. This is another hot tip for when you're launching a dam.
Lisa Grimm: Yes.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Go into the directory and find the records manager and make friends with them because their work will impact your work. And if you get like I did in one organization, you end up getting a box sometimes. And this stuff used to I mean now it's in It's online, but but the stuff from before isn't, so here's the box. And I know you're gonna need this box. And I got several boxes, as it turns out.
E Keathley: have worked with exactly one organization where they had REM, which is records management, which is the compliance records,
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Lisa Grimm: Mm.
E Keathley: knowledge management, which was
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm-hmm.
E Keathley: the library and the dam
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
E Keathley: and data governance and the archives all in one under one department head on the same floor. And it was beautiful. It was beautiful. It lasted, it was,
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Okay. Wow.
Lisa Grimm: wow. that's amazing.
E Keathley: it was working. We were clicking along and they came and they took it apart.
Lisa Grimm: huh.
E Keathley: and
Meg Morrissey (she/her): They love a reorg.
E Keathley: I yeah, it was
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: a reorg and I it broke my heart because it was I was like, this is the way it should be. And like all of us that were working together was like, Man, we got it going. We got the library on the front end with the cataloging the current things that are going on. We got them rolling things into the legal compliance into RIM that's going. And if it needs to stay long long term, we've got this archive and man, they're just the top of the profession, some of the people that were in that thing, and we had it kicking along, and I have no idea why that organization decided to re-orgit. I think it was because the dam was so expensive. And they didn't
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah, priorities.
E Keathley: understand that the dam belonged there. And we can't and they were like, well that's IT. That's IT. That's IT. And we're like, yes,
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm.
E Keathley: I work with IT daily. But that's not what we're doing.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah. Yeah. Somebody running
E Keathley: And you need to have us all sitting together so we can talk because being able to talk just just having the cubes lined up that way was incredible.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm-hmm.
E Keathley: Well, the cubes and the door to the archive 'cause they were climate controlled, but it was incredible. And
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
E Keathley: I hope to see that happen across the industry. But the fact that the one place where it happened, it got dismantled still kind of blows my mind.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): You could have a a whole episode about where the damn lives in an organization. It's
Lisa Grimm: absolutely. Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): they kept
E Keathley: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): asking me at one one one place where we started out in, I started out in creative services, and it very quickly ballooned. Like very
E Keathley: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): quickly ballooned. Our use cases ballooned, everyone was knocking on our door, and we were building out processes that were supporting the entire company. We went enterprise.
E Keathley: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): We went from fifty beta users to over 8,000 users in two years. And we
Lisa Grimm: wow. Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): we should not creative services shouldn't be footing the bill for that. And that conversation of well where where do we put you? And we don't put you in IT because that's not how IT works. you know, you're you're actually doing business administration as well, so you can't be in IT. And you can't really, you shouldn't be in creative services. And I said, You're a massive organization who has the capability to do this. You need an asset management vertical. You have pieces all over the company. People were contacting me going, I hear you're working on X Dam at you know at this organization. I was like, No, I'm not. There's two other dams. And
Lisa Grimm: gosh.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): None of us are talking to each other. And when the workflow is the photographer creates the asset, the team that needs to put it on an app or something online goes into your dam, downloads it, uploads it into another dam, adds new metadata, flips a switch to push it into the CMS, goes into the CMS, adds more metadata. And then lets the tech team know it's ready for staging, you've got some problems there. you know, your tech stack isn't precious, your users are. So
Lisa Grimm: Yes.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): having having things that talk to each other is very important. And having people talk
Lisa Grimm: Yes.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): to each other before you buy a product is very important.
Lisa Grimm: Yes, please.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): I worked in a company where they were standing up a dam. And about two months after they signed Inc., they they hired someone to do a custom brand portal.
E Keathley: Okay. Well that's a choice. I mean I just wish I I really
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yep. Yep. They didn't talk to each other.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. Of course.
E Keathley: wish we could, you know, through this podcast
Meg Morrissey (she/her): I mean that was a while ago.
E Keathley: and other places continue to spread the word that maybe you hire the digital asset manager before you buy the system.
Lisa Grimm: Yes, please.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yes.
Lisa Grimm: my gosh. Yes, top tip. I feel like if there's one takeaway for everyone, it's probably that. Yeah.
E Keathley: Please, please hire the digital asset manager before you buy the system. I had someone contact me this week and they didn't understand why they weren't getting the candidates that they wanted for a job that was back on the East Coast. I'm in Portland now. So I'm kind of I'm not in the market for anything where I have to go into the office, you know, back in Atlanta anymore. And I had someone contact me and they were like company just signed this deal with this company with this with this damn vendor and now we can't find anybody who wants to work for us. And I was like, okay, well what vendor was it? And the minute they told me the vendor's name. The minute they told me the vendor's name, you l Lisa
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha We'll know we'll know but
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
E Keathley: knows who like the minute like I just closed my eyes and Lisa went, I know who it was.
Lisa Grimm: Yep.
E Keathley: the minute they said the vendor's name, I was like, well, your problem is that you signed with with vendor X and no one wants to go work with that system in that market. And they were like, Well that but there's all these people in New York use this system and all this other people use this system and I don't understand. I was like, Okay, but can you get out of it? And they were like, No, we can't get out of
Lisa Grimm: 'Cause the wrong people are buying it. Yeah.
E Keathley: it. You know, 'cause they're their their bosses aren't gonna admit they made a mistake.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Mm-hmm.
Lisa Grimm: Right.
E Keathley: And you haven't loaded the first asset. You know?
Lisa Grimm: Exactly that.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): This is the time. This is the time to change it. Right here.
E Keathley: They well, how much how much ego and hubris are we going to go after in the C suite to admit that
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: you just spent a year on an RFP, chose the wrong system, and now you can't hire anybody to work in it?
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah, how
Lisa Grimm: Mm.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): how much money are you willing to trade for your pride? How much is that worth to
Lisa Grimm: this is it.
E Keathley: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): you?
E Keathley: Yeah. All the way
Lisa Grimm: A hundred percent.
E Keathley: down. You just bought
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Because it's gonna cost.
E Keathley: an unusable dam because you can't hire anybody to load into it. And you'll they'll get somebody eventually if they offer enough money. or
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah it or
E Keathley: they'll get somebody really young who's just gonna get in there, get thrown into the deep end of the pool
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: and have a story for us later on when the cameras are off.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): It's it's gonna be,
Lisa Grimm: Definitely, definitely.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): yeah, you're gonna get a you're gonna give someone a great learning experience.
E Keathley: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yes.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And you're you're gonna you're gonna have a great case study for what it's like to migrate early on in your dam journey because it's it's going to break. And it
E Keathley: Yeah. That's exactly right. It's gonna break.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): you know, and when you're picking your dam, you mentioned this in a previous episode where you know, when you're picking a vendor. learn who you're actually going to work with because
Lisa Grimm: yes.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): the sales team is gonna be salesy and they're going to, you know, and
E Keathley: A lie to you.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): and when you need that much of a palette cleanse after a call, you don't really want to work with them. And we spend so much time with them. And are they gonna listen to us? What is their what is their support package like? Are we are we buying enough to earn a full CSM?
Lisa Grimm: Mm. Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Or are we only getting a fraction? And that you learn that the hard way. And we know to ask
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): these questions and we say, I want to talk to your implementation manager. I want to talk to a couple of CSMs. I want to know if they are willing to meet me where I am and advocate for my needs when everybody's looking at Salesforce and deciding which feature requests are going to get worked on.
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm. Hundred percent.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Can can you tell I've worked at a vendor? I'm your best and worst. Best and worst
E Keathley: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. yeah, yeah, we've all been Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): client.
E Keathley: I have actually never worked for a vendor.
Lisa Grimm: you've got to get in on it. It's it's good experience. Yeah.
E Keathley: to say like like I'm like I'm you know because Henrik's always like I'm vendor agnostic I would never but to be honest like for the right amount of money I don't care like I got paid a I got I got paid I did get paid to speak at a photo wear
Lisa Grimm: And it's great to see how the sausage is made, you know, like to get on all sides of it. Yeah. Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): It's yeah. I learned a lot.
E Keathley: conference in twenty fourteen. That's the only time a vendor's ever given me money. and I was that was actually like the most lovely experience. But you know those northern European systems just kill it. Every single time. I know.
Lisa Grimm: Hey.
E Keathley: but yeah, no, I I I you guys have both like you've worked for vendors. I haven't. maybe one day, I don't know.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Try it out if you get a chance. Nothing is more
Lisa Grimm: The circle of life.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): satisfying than telling a product team that's not how we will use it. And having them go
Lisa Grimm: Yes yes.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): back and actually change it.
Lisa Grimm: Absolutely.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Speaking with engineering teams, it's so eye-opening. It really helps you understand like what their limitations are. And when something you look at something, you go, why? Just I have two questions. Why and how dare you?
E Keathley: Why did you do that?
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha
Meg Morrissey (she/her): You you know, like, okay, well, I know this is what's happening behind the scenes. I know they're going to think this. Why do you think I need the delete button to work in some screens and not others? Why why
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): is this always the issue? Is it's the same, I want the same experience anywhere I am. However I click into that, I want the same experience. And just having that like background knowledge of They didn't they didn't test this properly. If you go back and tell them, like, hey, you didn't test it properly, you need to test on this. And is that product team gonna listen? Depends on the vendor. Kinda hard to interview for. but I mean, now I have some questions I would ask if I were if I were talking to vendors to select a dam that I never would have thought to ask before. But there are, and you guys mentioned this in a previous episode, there's some small shops that really do it right. And a big
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm.
E Keathley: They they are, yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): part of it is they help you craft what you need to get something prioritized and get the change you want.
E Keathley: Because your business matters to them. Like if that's Yeah, you do.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yes, and you need a partner. You don't you don't
Lisa Grimm: Yes.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): want just a vendor. You want a partner who will tell you the truth, even if it's a little inconvenient for them because they know the long game is you're going to stay. And you're going
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. Completely.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): to be happy and you're going to talk about it because if they're smart, they know we all talk to each other.
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And when we all go to Henry Stewart and we sit down at lunch, we talk shop. And
E Keathley: Shop is a word for it.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Shop is shop is you know, we what's what's the what's what's going on?
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. There are drinks after as well where it's, you know, after dark. So there's all sorts of all sorts of discussion. Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yes. Yes. The the the drinks start flowing and the stories come in and you want to be someone who your damn manager who's using you is saying, They're great. I love them. They're taking me out to dinner later. Ideally. They're taking me out to dinner later. Like they're amazing.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, we also like that. Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): They always have something or they'll figure it out and they'll get back to me. They care.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And not every company offers that. Some of the ones I've worked with would not be a surprise. but there are,
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha
Meg Morrissey (she/her): you know, if you've got a good team there who listens, the product may not be, you may not be their ideal persona, you may not be their ICP, but if they're willing to help you figure it out, sometimes that's worth it.
Lisa Grimm: Here, here. So I I think we'll we'll begin to wrap it up. We pr we probably gotta leave
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: it there pretty soon. But we could talk for hours and hours on all
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yes.
Lisa Grimm: of these topics. Like there's so much to dive into. But yeah, I think maybe we'll we'll leave everyone with kind of I I feel like we've already left them with kind of one really good kind of, you know, sort of parting parting tip. It's like make friends with the records manager, which is like massive, highly,
E Keathley: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: you know
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: You know, hire the damn person before you choose the damn, please. But yeah, any any other of those top tips we think, you know, do this and then you can make sure you're getting all of these other foundational elements into place.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah. Consider what it's going to be like to work with them for the next three to five years.
Lisa Grimm: Mm.
E Keathley: Consider the entire record management life cycle and consider putting that all in the same department.
Lisa Grimm: It's amazing. Living the dream.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yep.
E Keathley: Now.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): And and get your users to own that dam.
Lisa Grimm: Here, here. amazing. this is beautiful. we should do this again. But Meg, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been a phenomenal discussion. I've already got ideas for kind of things we can do down the line too. So we may we may have to have you back for something else. So stay tuned, stay tuned there. But for all of those listeners, viewers, wherever you are, thank you so much. Join us again next week. We are thrilled to have you and we will see you again. Bye. and the book.
Meg Morrissey (she/her): Yeah.
