Lisa Grimm: hello, and welcome to Practical Dam. We are the digital asset management podcast that is a companion to practical digital asset management, a guide for students. and practitioners available wherever
E Keathley: Mm.
Lisa Grimm: good books are sold or online or other other places as well. We're very happy this is out in the world. I'm Lisa Grimm, your host, and I'm joined by my intrepid co-host, Elizabeth Keathley. Elizabeth, how are you?
E Keathley: Great.
Lisa Grimm: Wonderful to see you, and we are very excited to have a special guest on today. We have the amazing Jacqueline or Jack Yu, who's gonna talk to us all about migration, also a little bit of how she got into this field, and because we all think we lead relatively interesting lives outside of you know work stuff, we're also gonna talk a little bit about what Jack does in her spare time, which she doesn't have much of because she's also got a small child and all the other things, but she is an opera singer, so we are gonna talk a little bit about the arts, because you know, we're all into this kind of But before we do I want to say Jack, how are you today? Welcome.
Jacqueline Yu: Well, very excited to be here. Thank you for having me. We're good. We just... We're in the hypercare period of rolling out a new DAM to replace our, I think it's a 15 year old DAM. So it's all been very busy and exciting, Lisa. I know we're going through something similar at the moment. So it's
Lisa Grimm: Yes.
Jacqueline Yu: all pretty good. We're just making sure everything's migrated over. So our topic today is completely relevant to what we're doing. Do I dream about it? Do we dream about it? I think we dream about it. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: absolutely, yeah. we're living and dreaming and breathing migration, which it's it's it's a whole it's a whole thing. Yeah, like like you
Jacqueline Yu: What even is that?
Lisa Grimm: say. Yeah, I'm in the middle of one as well. Fingers crossed, we're we're not to the hyper care yet. You're about a week or two ahead of us, so it's been interesting to be on a similar train, different platforms, different different things, but I think we'll we'll get to a lot of similar similar challenges and similar issues because there's a lot of stuff that you kinda whether you anticipate it or not just kinda seems to crop up. So we'll talk a little bit about that as we
Jacqueline Yu: Absolutely.
Lisa Grimm: get into the topic.
E Keathley: what system you're migrating from and to? And you can be as close
Jacqueline Yu: But we are...
E Keathley: about that as you want to be.
Jacqueline Yu: We are moving off from OpenText with whom we've been since 2012 or earlier and it was hosted on-premise with a very very old metadata model. and then I think well two three years ago, no 2022, four years ago, where did the time go man? We did
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
Jacqueline Yu: a server migration like from the hosting we were on ECL2 to a sure to us you so it's so this is like the second migration that I have done but not quite the same way yeah
E Keathley: was about to say yeah so you've already gone
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: from an on prem legacy system you move that to the cloud and now you're going to a new SaaS vendor right okay so
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah, absolutely. So that was fun.
E Keathley: you got you got a lot going on there.
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha
E Keathley: You have two separate migrations that have happened. You should feel really proud of yourself. It's a big deal.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, you're here.
Jacqueline Yu: I didn't do the heavy lifting, the guys did, you know, so that was great. No, thank you. How do we test?
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha
E Keathley: You're there. They can't do it without you, trust.
Lisa Grimm: Absolutely.
Jacqueline Yu: Making sure everything's fine, but thank you. It's been great. Yeah, they're very different migrations too, because one of them is to make sure that all the functionalities are fine. We didn't lose anything. And then this one, because we are building, well configuring a SaaS solution. then, so this time around, we have the whole metadata model, the security model to build. We've got making sure that all the things are working properly. And you know what things are, they never work perfectly.
Lisa Grimm: No, no.
E Keathley: Course not. The
Jacqueline Yu: So...
E Keathley: dream of automation is always always belied by the you know, the reality of the hands on corrective work afterwards, right? Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah, well we need to put people behind it. No magic button!
Lisa Grimm: exactly this. And then we this is why we're always advocating. You need the people to make this happen. So, you know, a hundred percent.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. And we'll we'll get into that, but before we do, let's let's do a little rewind, 'cause I think people find all of these paths into this strange world of Dan really interesting. So, Jack, tell us how you landed in this space. How did you get here?
Jacqueline Yu: Well, I did it completely by accident, actually.
Lisa Grimm: Normal, yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: So as you've... very kindly introduced me as doing something else. my degrees are in music actually, so I do still sing professionally. It's a shameless plug if are, if it's within the UK, if you have events that you need to hire, I'm available, contact me LinkedIn.
Lisa Grimm: You hear?
Jacqueline Yu: But it is a, so... Like all other musicians or struggling professionals who
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: worked in like, which we call it, hospitality, et cetera, et cetera. So we've got a lot of... side gigs and stuff. So I've done my stint in hospitality. By the way, I highly recommend anybody who work in DAM or any sort of product ownership, anything, do at least a short stint in hospitality. It helps with communication. It helps with
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: dealing with people, really learning what people want. And it could get you far further than you think it would. Not about programming
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, absolutely.
E Keathley: Yeah. And
Jacqueline Yu: languages. It's about how how to people. I benefited a lot. Yeah.
E Keathley: In library school, yeah. In library
Lisa Grimm: Hmm.
E Keathley: school, there's this whole concept of what's called a reference interview, which is just about
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: how do you talk to people who are looking for things and how to find out what they really need to find versus what
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: they think they're searching for. And that is so important when you're building a metadata model that's gonna query a collection correctly for the right audience. There's a thing that they think that they need and the thing they think they're asking for, and then the asset that they actually need. And being able to serve up that surprise of something better than what they thought they were going in for is really important. And you don't get that unless you have this, you know, hospitality skills
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: or reference interview skills.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, and
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, but like I said, otherwise you're learning how to people. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: I think everybody should learn how to people, right, especially in the current day and age. So I've done my time.
E Keathley: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: And I thought I should I I got bored because I had zero
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: ambition in hospitality I don't want to run a hotel. I don't want to I managed to learn
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: a lot. I picked up a lot of skills and I thought This is cool. I make a mean coffee despite not having caffeine at all. Yeah, we'll talk about it offline And
Lisa Grimm: Mm. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: then I I wanted to move into doing a a more like office-based kind of
Lisa Grimm: Hm.
Jacqueline Yu: work. I want to test myself in that area. And I talked to some recruitment agencies like staffing or talent agency and person said, I worked with this company called ICP. They're looking for somebody. I
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm.
Jacqueline Yu: think you should give it a go. And I had no idea what ICP did. I had no idea what digital asset management is, which
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha
Jacqueline Yu: is I've learned since that, which is very different from asset management, because if you work with asset management, you'll be far richer.
E Keathley: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: than what we are right now. So that was the beginning.
Lisa Grimm: That's true.
Jacqueline Yu: I think one more thing is... I was a school librarian when I was in primary school. I was single digit old when
E Keathley: Yay
Jacqueline Yu: I did my first librarian job. So we watched the library being built. so I grew up learning how to put covers on the books and there were different classification system and stuff. So it was really cool. So this is, you do it on computer, right? So that's how that works.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: So I thought this is is cool production company is also fun and and that's how I got into it in time for Covid. Okay imagine hospitality and music both were heavily hit so I'm still counting
Lisa Grimm: Yes. Dun dun dun. Yeah. absolutely.
Jacqueline Yu: my little lucky stars to be honest but but that's how
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: got it.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: Nice.
Lisa Grimm: my gosh, it's amazing. Yeah. And I always tell people too, like, especially when you're going to a conference or or you know, like you say, you're you've just been training people, like having that kind of background just gives you that ability to just be on in front of people and be ready to, you know, work through whatever gets thrown at you, whether the demo doesn't work or whether, you know, you're explaining something and you have, you know, someone who really doesn't like it, you you can you've got those sort of improvisational skills to just be able to roll with it. And I think it's it's massively, massively as as we know. Know underinvested in but also like underappreciated by kind of the powers that be. But I think it's it's so good for you. So
E Keathley: It is.
Jacqueline Yu: It is really handy because like seriously how many times did we have a perfect demo?
Lisa Grimm: yeah. We could talk about demos. Yeah. Sometimes you get a precanned perfect demo, but anyway, that's another that's another story. But
Jacqueline Yu: Exactly, so it's
E Keathley: Always
Jacqueline Yu: important.
E Keathley: if I have an important demo, I always have screenshots as a PowerPoint as backup. I've had too many
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: bad things happen to me over the years. I'm not gonna fall on my face. If something isn't happening, we're gonna say, Okay, there's gremlins in our internet connection today. I'm gonna go back to this canned slide thing that I have. Here's what happens. and nobody is gonna fault you out for that. If you have a screenshot
Lisa Grimm: absolutely.
E Keathley: screenshot PowerPoint as backup and it only makes you look more professional, honestly. They're like, well they're prepared. It's a nice thing to have. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, a hundred percent and yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: got Plan B, NCs and As.
Lisa Grimm: This is it it's funny how we're mentioning all these sort of be prepared, have a fallback plan because again we're talking about migration today and I think
E Keathley: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: you always need at sort of every step in the process, yeah, be prepared, have a fallback plan. What are you doing if X or Y doesn't work? So maybe if we wanna we we don't have to do the full airing of dirty laundry, because we've all been through multiple of of these, but I think there are some key themes that come up again and again and again. And I I will always start with, you know, so often we're either brought in midstream or Or you know, something else has happened first. So they haven't done necessarily that sort of content audit up front or the data cleansing up front. So you're like, we're gonna be doing it as we go. I'm just curious, you both of your perspectives, how you've seen this play out, how you know there's gonna be rework later, but how do you try to mitigate?
Jacqueline Yu: of the UE.
E Keathley: yeah. well, I think my favorite migration that I ever did was off of a very old video catalog system. And I'm not gonna say the vendor's name and you'll know why in a minute. And what this was was it was almost like a flat file. Like the videos were not attached to the catalog. It was just a catalog. And it was a catalog that went a h that went alongside a very popular video editing software and you could you could purchase from a third party vendor. this product that would catalog your videos off of this software. And of course I'm coming in and we're putting in a DAM. And so I need to get this video catalog from this third party. I need to get those records integrated into the DAM with video for the first time and make everybody very happy. We can click on the catalog and not just see the record but have the video right there. And I called the vendor because I'd heard that they had some new solution that also had video in it. And I wanted to see if this is something where I could do a portal and maybe do it side by side. Maybe there's an easier way to do this. Maybe we don't have to break a contract. Let's figure out what we can do with a UI. And I called him and he didn't know who I was. And he didn't know what a v digital asset management system was. And he made me tell him who I was two or three times. And he like, What is your background? And of course he's only used to dealing with video production people. I tell him, you know, this all, you know, my philosophy in this comes out of library science. I come from a library background. This is what we're building. This is what we're doing. And he goes, librarians, I thought you were just little old ladies in cardigans who played with puppets. And I went, Ha ha ha ha ha. And that was the exact moment when I knew I was killing his contract.
Lisa Grimm: ha ha yeah.
E Keathley: And I mean, I already kind of knew that I was gonna do that because he had no idea
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: what we were talking about or what we were trying to do, which was also sort of mind blowing. I think that this one company had gotten so fat off this automatic cataloging software off this very popular video editing program that they weren't used to having to fight for their money. They weren't used to having to fight for clients.
Lisa Grimm: Right, right.
E Keathley: They were like, no, we're just plug and play to this popular video editing platform. Easy sell, right? And a few months later, after I had killed their contract and I had like come through and was negotiating at the end of our contract to pull out all the metadata from this
Lisa Grimm: Mm.
E Keathley: legacy system, I was like, Okay, and I've gone through your contract and it says that you give us the option to buy out the records. And they were like, We don't do that. And I was like, Yes, you do. Here it is. It says right here
Lisa Grimm: Right.
E Keathley: that you do. So you need to give me a price right now because we're doing this. You know, and they weren't used
Jacqueline Yu: librarians read.
E Keathley: to people being able to do that either.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: they just weren't used they just weren't ready for me. Like they had never had anybody just come
Lisa Grimm: Right.
E Keathley: in and just like, Okay, well, we're yanking everything. Sorry. And when we're yanking everything, we're not gonna re catalog it. We're gonna give you you're gonna give it to me so that I can run ETL. And you know, another rep called me and the guy on the phone who had said the first thing to me, was there and he was like, Well, we just wanna understand why you're leaving. And like and I went through the thing and I explained
Lisa Grimm: Sure.
E Keathley: what I did and they're like and and they like and you talked to him about this. You told him you were doing this. I like, Yeah and then he told me that he thought librarians were little ladies in cardigans who played with puppets
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha
E Keathley: and that's when I knew that you guys just really weren't ready to handle what we're gonna do. And like there was just silence on the phone. And they were like,
Jacqueline Yu: Mic drop.
E Keathley: Okay. And
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: I had I had my records the next day.
Lisa Grimm: wow. That's okay, that's pretty impressive.
E Keathley: It was twenty th yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: amazing.
E Keathley: It was twenty thousand records and I had in an XML flat file and they were exactly what they needed to be. And then we pulled over.
Lisa Grimm: wow. Didn't have to
Jacqueline Yu: for a moment.
Lisa Grimm: like pull it out of an Excel or anything. They were just what you Amazing. Living the dream.
E Keathley: No. They I've they were done. They knew I wasn't gonna mess around and they were gonna give it to me. I had to pay twenty thousand dollars for it 'cause that was in the
Lisa Grimm: Sure.
E Keathley: contract price and I'm sure that contracts were rewritten after that for it to be more difficult. yeah. yeah, for sure.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: Everybody got something out, yeah?
Lisa Grimm: yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I have a cardigan, it's just you know, it's not been cool enough. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: We wear glasses, not cardigans.
E Keathley: I love my cardigans. I have a whole collection. They're
Lisa Grimm: Sometimes my cat will sit in
E Keathley: arranged by color.
Lisa Grimm: the pocket of my cardigan, but you know, not today.
E Keathley: Nice.
Lisa Grimm: It's it's too warm. So
Jacqueline Yu: Very nice. Yeah.
E Keathley: Classic.
Lisa Grimm: yeah. It's it's pretty good. It's pretty good. Highly recommend
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: as a as a fashion choice. But yeah,
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: no, I I think that's you know, i again just thinking about the data piece, it's so important because you know it's
Jacqueline Yu: yeah.
Lisa Grimm: it's easy to visualize the lift and shift if it's e if you are indeed doing a lift and shift. Although we'll say folks, if you are doing the lift and shift, you're not taking the time to go through and say, do I still need this? Do I still need this?
E Keathley: That's true.
Lisa Grimm: You know Can I map this more effectively? So sometimes you can build that in along the way, but I I've always found whenever someone says, it's gonna be fine, we're just gonna lift and shift it, something either goes wrong with how it maps from one system to another, or just in terms of like, again, you're losing opportunities to potentially say, but could we do this more effectively? Could we have a better model? Could we have something that's going to, you know, more effectively think about our upstream or downstream systems? So I think, and again, I think that's a situation a lot of people are finding themselves. themselves in now of moving from something that was kind of a standalone or maybe integrated to a CMS
E Keathley: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: into a much bigger ecosystem and then it's like what what are all the implications and have we thought about them versus just going from system A to system B? So
Jacqueline Yu: So I have some... fund learnings in my current project. So yeah,
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha ha.
E Keathley: Please share, Jack. That's why you're here.
Jacqueline Yu: so our current setup, so even before the implementation of the new DAM, we already have a very good, very close integration with our CMS and thus the CDNs too. so we've just implemented our product information management system slash, well, they can also handle a master data management kind of situation. So it's newly implemented. Not quite tried, not quite tested with integrating with other systems. I think there are integration with SFCC, the Salesforce Commerce
Lisa Grimm: Mm.
Jacqueline Yu: Cloud, if I get it right.
E Keathley: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: yeah, SFCC is what they've got with the econ people to do that. So they have that kind of integration, but what they have been trying to use assets, they're still using the CDN links that are not integrated. the DAM because they knew
Lisa Grimm: Mm.
Jacqueline Yu: that the DAM is getting, well we are redoing everything, burning the whole thing down. Content delivery network.
E Keathley: And C D N is and C D N is. Okay, great.
Jacqueline Yu: So the CDN, should I give a very quick explanation? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
E Keathley: Yeah, so you have a master, you have a master data platform, right? Metadata management platform. And feeding into that, you have a PIM, which is a product management system. You have a Salesforce. What else did you have? Uh-huh. Right? Which is your website, right?
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah, yeah, which is the econ things. And then we've got a CMS and then a Dan. Yeah. And then we've got, our CMS actually does a lot of publishing beyond just the website. We handle translation and
E Keathley: Sure. As you do as you do, yeah, nice.
Lisa Grimm: okay, interesting. Yeah, yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: unstructured content too. We have our CMS is with Tridion.
E Keathley: Nice.
Lisa Grimm: Okay, yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: So RWS now I think is... before was SDL. people, yeah,
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: we are very loyal customers. to a lot of companies.
E Keathley: Okay. And and S D L is right, and S D L is
Lisa Grimm: You invest in those legacy systems, yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: It was the company name. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
E Keathley: All right. Good. We're gonna get all our acronyms out here so people know what we're talking about. So you're really talking about right. So what we're really
Lisa Grimm: Yes. And there are a lot of them. There are a lot. Yeah.
E Keathley: talking about, Jack, which is this makes me so happy, is that you're explaining
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: a larger information architecture that DAM fits into, which is something that we haven't talked about on these podcasts yet, and how complex it can get. And this is such
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: a great example of that. I love the fact that, you know, you have a CMS involved in that. In many large organizations, a CMS is completely separate and it's often another world, you know, and they're doing their own thing just because sometimes brand management and website management can be two completely different hands in a company that don't necessarily talk to each other, crazy as that seems, it's not uncommon.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: So that's wonderful that you're part of an entirely integrated ecosystem of an information architecture that's well thought out. That's
Jacqueline Yu: Thank you.
E Keathley: rare and awesome and super cool that you get to work with it.
Jacqueline Yu: We are working on integrating with these systems. So, thank you for that by the way. So we've got,
E Keathley: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: so the MVP is to have the CMS and PIM integrating with the DAM so that
E Keathley: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: we don't need to manage our product launch cycle individually because that's what we've been doing before.
E Keathley: Nice.
Jacqueline Yu: And because we work on UTC and then
E Keathley: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: a lot of people don't understand UTC.
E Keathley: Okay,
Lisa Grimm: Hm.
E Keathley: so
Jacqueline Yu: we get like, isn't it just British
E Keathley: tell people what UTC is.
Jacqueline Yu: time? that universal time
E Keathley: Greenwich.
Jacqueline Yu: standard, yeah. No, no, no, Greenwich is GMT. Greenwich mean time. Yeah,
E Keathley: It's different? GMT. Okay.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, like
Jacqueline Yu: but UTC is a universal standard thing. They are basically the same, but then they mean different things, if that makes sense, because people think GMT just means like UK time. then daylight saving time is a thing. So we are current, so I am based in the UK. and We are currently still under British summer time. So we're actually an hour ahead of GMT, which is the Greenwich time, which is also the UTC time. Yeah, time is weird. So so people, you know, people can
Lisa Grimm: Wibbly wobbly, timey whimey. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: make mistake. So by having all of this product related information standardized coming from the PIM, all the changes only been made once. And if the PIM has an update, all other systems get update is very important to us because what what is time and launch cycle we we we need to make sure our product and assets and web pages are under wraps make sure that they're unpublished and still within staging until until the time comes so having discrepancies is it's a nightmare yeah let's not think about that yeah
E Keathley: Yeah, I actually I actually define time in our glossary in my first
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: two books. And Lisa, did we define time in the current book? Can you look real quick? Yeah, because and people were like, why did you put a definition of time
Lisa Grimm: But let me let me look and see if we did it. We do have a glossary, so.
Jacqueline Yu: You're done done done!
E Keathley: in there? And I was like, You have no idea. It's
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: so important. You're you're gonna be thinking about time in ways
Jacqueline Yu: This is why.
E Keathley: that doesn't that don't make any sense to a practical person and people will look at you like you have squirrels coming out of your ears. But time is so important and it's this concept that runs through digital asset management at a really deep level. When you get into it, when you are dealing with time and a digital asset management system, you have hit the upper level of what we do. It's a great do we have it, Lisa? We got it.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, you've we've got it. We've got it. Time, a dimension used to measure the progress in space and the duration of events. So take that sapphire and steel. But yes, we've got
E Keathley: So that we know what we're talking about.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah. Yeah. And...
Lisa Grimm: it we've we've got it defined. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: And earlier we talked about different systems that a company have. So whoever may be watching this, hopefully there are more people getting involved because you ladies are awesome.
E Keathley: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: We also have a design system, brand site, social media management platform, et
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm.
Jacqueline Yu: cetera, et cetera. And partner portal. We have sales partner, cetera, et cetera. Sales and enablement situation, more Salesforce. more oracle stuff you know it's
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: it's so they all well i mean we we all DAM ladies so you know not to toot our own horn here but the DAM actually
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: sits quite center of this
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: If we integrate with all these systems, well, first of all, usage rights, usage management would be much easier if we need to pull any products and expiry will be better. If we need to update anything, then. how no more downloading, re-uploading and then losing track of it. And do you remember back a few years ago before chat GBT and all that was all the rage? Well, blew up and before that, the focus I think off a lot of fenders was on content performance.
Lisa Grimm: yeah, yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah, right. Like, I think there are still vendors trying to solve it, like actively. I think we've seen some announcements coming from various vendors lately. But content performance had always been a thorn. Or
Lisa Grimm: Sure.
Jacqueline Yu: like the magic unicorn that people were trying to get to the holy grail of marketing or something like that,
E Keathley: The the metric that where we're gonna say it's not made up, we're gonna figure out this content performance metric
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: and it's gonna mean what we think it means. Yeah, it's really super elusive.
Jacqueline Yu: Yes. Yeah, something, something,
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: hi, something, something like, you know, all of it. So especially in the current climate, right. So so it's important that we need to make sure whatever we create is getting the result that we want. Let's be honest here, ladies. Do we clean up after ourselves well when we do testing or when we do publishing and stuff?
E Keathley: That is a great question. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: It depends.
Jacqueline Yu: doing.
E Keathley: I I think also this gets to the heart of something that Lisa and I were talking about with the guys at Georgia Tech. We did a really great podcast with them called Lost in the Stacks. And Charlie Bennett asked me, like, why were so many systems built with no cataloging or library or search in mind?
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: and I said something that I probably shouldn't have said, which is I said, I think search is a little bit gendered. You know, you have men writing these programs and then they don't know how to clean up after themselves. But then I thought about it more. I understand that's a little bit misandressed. Let us say that there's an entire class of people that aren't used to cleaning up after themselves. And so they build these systems and then they don't take care of the back end, which is the maintenance of it, the organization of it all, the having a place on a shelf. digitally for this thing to belong. You created the object. Did you just leave all the mess in the garage? Or did you find a place and
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: a shelf for it? And if you don't approach that holistically within these asset management environments, within this creative environment, you're right, Jack. We're not gonna have, you know, a clean system. We're gonna have all these tests out there and you have to clean as you go, or you end up as a hoarder, you know?
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, well it it it's funny because I've just come back from Product Content Europe, which is looking at things kind of from from the PIM side of the the fence, although obviously very much talking about integrated ecosystems, where does DAM fit in? Where where do does everything else fit in? And there were so many discussions that I think we've been having in the DAM space for years on, you know, again, your governance, how often are you going in and tidying things up? And and again, I don't want to say that these are new to the PIM space because I'm sure they've been having them all this time as well, but it was funny how How there was this real focus on novice, we want to have, you know, the the cleanest data we can possibly have, but how do you build that in? And sometimes you just have to get something over the line again, thinking about migration again. Sometimes it's not going to be perfect. How do you define what's good enough? You know, and then how do you build
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: in time for technical debt for that cleanup after? Because you can't just leave it. You still have to come and fix it. So
E Keathley: Right. So what what we're kinda dancing around here, Jack, is as you're doing your migration, you're doing a massive weeding, I'm assuming.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah, we did a two year long content auditing of all the assets. So I had a librarian to help us. Yeah. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: we love
E Keathley: Two years. Two years. And just to say this, like again, Jack took two years because Jack was doing the job correctly. When I see on a timeline that somebody's gonna do a content audit in ninety days, like no way, man. That's not happening. Like what yeah. But it's never a thousand assets, Jack. It's never
Lisa Grimm: Or a week, or yeah. Sure, that's true.
Jacqueline Yu: If you have a thousand assets then yeah sure but when you have like when you have hundreds of thousands no it's
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. Well, and
Jacqueline Yu: never
Lisa Grimm: actually to that point too, when we're talking about migration, 'cause you know, you're you're migrating from point A to point B, or you may might be migrating from points A, B, X, Y, Z, and a bunch in between that you don't
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: even know about or where they came from and and I think then you have this real call to make about how much are you as as the person, you know, as the as a DAM professional looking after this versus how much do you push back on business teams and say, You guys own this content, you need to tell me what's important Here are some guidelines you can use, but it's
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: it's always a it's always a battle. So
Jacqueline Yu: So what we've done is, well, in the nicest way possible. I adore a lot of people I work with and they are, they're like in the nicest way. Yeah,
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. You're like, not everyone is terrible, some people are nice. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: and you know what it's like, especially if you work in corporate, everybody is just like, I'm doing three people's job, right? So everybody's
Lisa Grimm: Of course.
Jacqueline Yu: doing three people's job. And I get it. But the thing is, guys, you own the content.
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: I can't tell you whether you're going to keep it or not, but what I can tell you is you're missing metadata in here, important ones, including like especially usage rights, because
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: without that, you can't use the asset at all because the asset is as good as useless. So, so yeah,
Lisa Grimm: Absolutely. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: so that's our holy grail. If it doesn't have usable, like understandable usage rights information that that that that that is that can be interpreted properly, then this asset has problems. and then she's like why can't you do it for me? She's like dude I'm not you I can't read your mind so yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, we don't know where it's come from, we don't know where you licensed it, you know, all that. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: I don't know. I don't I'm not involved in any content creation. I don't I don't talk to any of the creative agencies. You do. So unless you have that, we are not moving it. I don't care. So and then another thing. So so you need to do that. And then another thing is well, that's why I took two years because people take that long to get back to us. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, yeah.
E Keathley: They do.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah. And the ultimatum, you have to give ultimatum to people. It's just like if you don't
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: get this information to us by the time we need to do this, then it is not coming. And yeah. It is simple, that's. And of course, we would have people who are very focused on delivery and stuff like that. just, can't we park them somewhere? Can't we move them over and then we'll sort them out later? If we say we'll
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: Well that's an yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: do them later, we will never do them.
Lisa Grimm: Right.
E Keathley: Well, we we talked about that when we talked about workflow too and accountability. Like you can't
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: solve an HR problem with the system. There is a
Jacqueline Yu: No, no you can't.
E Keathley: certain HR component to this, like you're saying, where there's consequences
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: where it's like, No, you're giving it to us by the state or it's not going into the system. And of course,
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: you know, you you hope that they're not gonna go around you and make their own system. You know.
Lisa Grimm: Right.
E Keathley: you hope that you have enough management backs and
Jacqueline Yu: SharePine, boys!
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. Yeah. It's still in SharePoint, it's fine, right? Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: Sorry, sorry, but yes! Yeah.
E Keathley: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: Well, that's the whole thing. I think what we've also got is, I think earlier we talked about cleaning up after ourselves. It's not just
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: about test assets, because we touched on something about like CDN and CMS. I think a lot of people are trying to get the integration with. Pushing assets to the CDNs
E Keathley: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: is one thing, because that brings from a closed system to the domain, like public domain, that people can actually see all the cool stuff that we've done.
E Keathley: Be be explicit about
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: your C DN. What is it? Right.
Jacqueline Yu: our content delivery network. So what it is is... Your asset sits in your DAM, It's
E Keathley: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: a closed system. People need to log in to do it, selected people, et cetera, et cetera. But they need to go somewhere. So the CMS content management system, they do web publishing, et cetera, et If it's just text, it would be a very, very sad world. So they need all the videos, images, audio, all sort
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: of fun stuff. But what we've got in the DAM needed to be hosted somewhere to face publicly. we need to push all these assets to our content delivery network so that everybody else could actually see what we're talking about as part of the whole, well, that's the point. So
E Keathley: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: publishing these assets over had always been the focus. We don't have enough conversation about how do we pull those content off? How do we unpublish
Lisa Grimm: Mm, yeah.
E Keathley: Yeah. Expiry.
Jacqueline Yu: these bad boys? not just
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: expiry, but because if you replace them, right, it depending on how your CDN works. If you do a versioning, then that replaces the previous one, perhaps. if you, expiry is a great one, obviously, because you simply can't do that anymore. And then people worry about broken images. What about that?
Lisa Grimm: Yeah yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: get a bunch of like different dimensions, different context, have it replaced them for a while, you know, or get earlier notification. These are some of the solutions that we can then implemented but
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: we don't unpublish stuff enough and and and
Lisa Grimm: Mm, I agree. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: then the CDNs keep hosting all of these assets and then they can't keep growing and then they keep charging you more and more money
E Keathley: That's right.
Jacqueline Yu: yeah if you want to save money start unpublishing things
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, and that's the thing, the life cycle extends. Yeah.
E Keathley: Well, here's the thing though. So a business has a decision to make. They can pay someone to go through and do good asset stewardship, which is what they should do.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: Or they can pay that hosting fee. And unfortunately there's a calculation that some businesses make where they're like, Well, we'd rather just have old stuff out there than pay someone eighty thousand dollars a year to do that job and it is a full time job if the company's big enough.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Mm, absolutely.
E Keathley: And I hate that calculation because I, of course, think you should be paying someone eighty thousand dollars a year just to go through and do that part of the job and give them a window, you know, develop that new digital asset management talent. Start start with just that piece and move forward.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: I'm really wondering when the turnover and management philosophy is gonna happen. That people realize it's not worth having everybody see our trash out in public. 'Cause that's what it is,
Lisa Grimm: Right.
E Keathley: right? It's it's day old baked goods. Like it doesn't make your brand look good. You need to pay someone to be that cleaner.
Jacqueline Yu: Well, mean, if it's just on expiry alone, you get sued. We have all been sued before,
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: if we don't watch it.
E Keathley: everybody here.
Jacqueline Yu: So, and in France, it's triple, the damages are tripled. In some other countries, it's worse and some of them are far more strict. So you can't, and especially, so I work at an imaging company and come on, extra brand damage. So we need to make sure
Lisa Grimm: An imaging company. Yes.
Jacqueline Yu: everything is done properly. And yes, we invest in the time and energy to do it. Our IP team is great. our senior IP lawyer is one of my buddies and then we look at contracts like come on guys we've got let's let's do this yeah absolutely you learn so much yeah
Lisa Grimm: No, this is the thing. Always make friends with legal and compliance. They're just like they are here to help you. Absolutely. Yeah.
E Keathley: And and invest in learning how to read a contract yourself.
Jacqueline Yu: yeah
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: We standardize our MSAs with agencies
Lisa Grimm: good.
Jacqueline Yu: and then we mirrored that to our DAM so that it's very clear.
E Keathley: Nice.
Jacqueline Yu: With our new implementation, yeah, this is how I get job security, I think, because we are centralizing all the user's rights management. So
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: users, uploaders need to send us the rights template with or without that particular page in the contract and model release form and stuff
E Keathley: Right. Good.
Jacqueline Yu: like that so that we build a whole database in the new system so that it's easier for them to upload, minimizes the likelihood of them making a mistake because we are centralizing that bad boy for you.
Lisa Grimm: Yes.
Jacqueline Yu: so these are all like completely new changes. So when we map all these usage rights information to the new system, it gets very interesting because we are
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: in essence building a completely new metadata model.
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm.
Jacqueline Yu: And then we also found out that a lot of stuff that we don't
Lisa Grimm: yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: And then, and there are things that we do need, but it needs reorganizing.
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Jacqueline Yu: And I think when people talk about migration, security model,
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: we did a giant overhaul of that too. So OpenText actually has a really good role user group and security policy management. But it wasn't set up. to our purpose. So we need to
Lisa Grimm: Sure.
Jacqueline Yu: rethink the whole thing and then see how the new system can accommodate or satisfy all the requirements that we've got. So that was a fun piece of work. But yes, it's not just about getting the asset over to the new system, but the whole governance, access. approval process workflow if you want to if you
E Keathley: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: can it depends on
Lisa Grimm: All of them, yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: how ambitious they've got and how the systems are going to interact with one another the ones that you're integrating with. which doesn't cause a problem between the old assets and the newly updated assets, well the newly uploaded assets to the new system, so that they wouldn't have a conflict. So all of these need to be... thought about and tested
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: properly. But I think all of these are something that people really need to think about. And when you do documentation, I know the whole save agile, whatever thingy thingy, it's like deliver first documentation is
E Keathley: You're right.
Jacqueline Yu: just whatever. I love documentation. I hate doing it, but it needs to be done. And
Lisa Grimm: It needs to be done, yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah, but we again like we do a lot of all the steps in order to get to the delivery part There's a huge missing Missing section is like we're gonna do when you don't need them anymore The whole the whole cleanup
Lisa Grimm: Mm, mm, mm. Yeah, exactly.
Jacqueline Yu: thing the unpublished bit the archiving the retiring the asset
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. Some of them will go to cold storage. What cold storage? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: get a cardigan. you know, it's not what's the blob storage? What even is that? You know, so so I think it's it's, it's really important to think about it because delivery doesn't end the moment the products
Lisa Grimm: Absolutely.
Jacqueline Yu: launched delivery. Like launching a new DAM doesn't end the moment the moment hyper care ends. And and I also don't think people talk about change management enough.
Lisa Grimm: Absolutely. Yeah.
E Keathley: Yeah, the myth of done is something that
Jacqueline Yu: What even is that?
E Keathley: people don't like to hear about. There is no done. There's only next.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, there's I mean it's a program, it's not a project. Exactly. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: It's a JIRA thing. It's a JIRA thing, you know, it
E Keathley: Yeah. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: needs to close tickets because we are into like opening tickets and closing tickets now. yes, yes, we
Lisa Grimm: And then you can track them. You have numbers, 'cause we love to have numbers. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: do. like, yeah.
E Keathley: Line go up. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. Yeah, mine go up, yeah. No.
Jacqueline Yu: And change management isn't just about training. It's about like a whole, why are we doing this? Getting into like... what are we doing and it's a new ways of working. It's not... migration never ends.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, no, exactly. And that and actually
E Keathley: So at least yeah.
Lisa Grimm: just on that point too, 'cause like you you can you know, you have an opportunity to train people as maybe their particular brands or sub you know, brands,
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: whatever are coming are being migrated and then you can help them, you know, have them come in to help, you know, maybe do QA, get them into the system. But you're right, it's not about that, here's how you log in, here's how you search day of training or, you know, fifteen minutes of training. It's about going back to them and saying, Okay, change management, what's working for you, what's not, what do you love, what do
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: you hate, and keeping them engaged and and again you're pointing About documentation, having their name somewhere on the racy where you're gonna keep coming back to them and saying, We need you to help us with phase two. We're gonna have a workshop in two months' time to say, you know, we want to revisit this or make this better for you, or you know, again, or faster. Like we want that, you know, that
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: constant sort of feedback, but you need that, you know, you need the you in the middle to say, okay, here's how we're going to sort of orchestrate all of that. Because while you're pulling in old content and putting in new content, you're trying to get people. on side too, so people.
E Keathley: So so Jack has talked about her migration. Lisa, what migr what type of migration in general that you can talk about are you doing right now?
Lisa Grimm: So the the way I'm putting it is we are the without naming names, migrating from a a kind of old school I would say super old school, old school, like we're not talking open text era, but but more recent, but
Jacqueline Yu: Haha!
Lisa Grimm: a a DAM that's much more brand portal solution, kind of standalone
E Keathley: Right.
Lisa Grimm: to enterprise integrated with a lot of different things. You know, we're standing up all at once, DAM, PIM, some other some other fun acronyms at the same time. So
E Keathley: Right. So you're taking that step in evolution up into architecture management from just having a DAM
Lisa Grimm: Exactly that.
E Keathley: where people specifically go to s to search for specific things to taking your place within an overall enterprise architecture management ecosystem.
Lisa Grimm: A hundred percent, yeah.
E Keathley: That's so great. That's you know, you saw the glee just pouring off of me as as Jack talked about the complexity of what she was doing. But you're and you're going
Lisa Grimm: It's exciting. It's a lot. But it's it's huge. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: into that step with them. That's so great.
Lisa Grimm: It's it's really exciting and again it's a big it's a big
E Keathley: Uh-huh.
Lisa Grimm: challenge, but it's been to the the nice thing is because it's not sort of the first time there's a DAM, my kind of myth busting means I have to come in to explain to people why this is different, why this is not just we we had this platform, now we have that platform. No, it's about why again it's all about the why. So I get to pull out my my favorite analogy where I get to tell people, What you had before was like a library, what we have now is more like the gym. Your assets are due Things they're becoming actionable within this new space. They're being served elsewhere downstream. They're doing things automagically. But that only works if after we've migrated them from system A to system B, that the data model is all working, that it's all you know going to the places we expect it to go, that all of the basic all the workflows we've set up are triggering the right kind of behaviors. but again, you know, this is the because we're not up and live yet, we're still in the part where we're seeing all the all the sort of dirty laundry and things that aren't quite. quite right yet, but at same time, when parts of it are working, you're like, it works. This is really exciting to see, you know, the downstream bits. But but I think again, to come back to the idea of cleanup, like I know I can't clean up everything I would want to clean up before we go live, but I do have been able to go around to people and get the commitments to say, okay, but in our next phases I'm building in all this time to do this specific subset of cleanup and this specific subset of cleanup. And people have been like, Great, rock on you do that. And And it's good to just you know have the support because it's not always there, so you have to really advocate for why it's also going to improve the user experience down the line. And the nice thing is some of it is obvious to people because when you've imported legacy metadata, sometimes and and this isn't even in only in this specific case, I've seen this in so many places, you're pulling in all of these old tags that were folksonomies or that were assigned by you know some sort of tooling or that have nothing to do with anything. Is that adding value?
Jacqueline Yu: free text. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Or free text, yeah. I mean probably
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: not. But do we have the time to clean it up at the moment? No. But it's also like we've got other strategies where you can say, Well, okay, the we're
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: we're filtering other ways, or we're serving content other ways, and then we can build in time to come back and say, Let's completely change how we do this. And it becomes a governance piece, so it's
E Keathley: So
Lisa Grimm: but it's exciting. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: Fixed forwards is a thing. Some of these can be fixed forwards. Some of them are non-negotiable.
E Keathley: So right.
Jacqueline Yu: A lot of them are showstoppers, but there are things that we can do down the line. there are that the new system could help us find those things easier. So
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: it is all very exciting. Can I ask, like in your current client, they have a data architect? Did I have somebody who managed their content model?
Lisa Grimm: So we actually have a couple people in that space. It's very exciting
Jacqueline Yu: Don't.
Lisa Grimm: to be working with them and I was I was a couple people both in-house and then from kind of the the system integrator side of things. So it but where of course it it's really helpful is to have someone who really understands that in-house what's where, what does it do? And
Jacqueline Yu: yeah.
Lisa Grimm: again, I wouldn't say we've solved all of it yet. There's still a lot that's you know needs to be defined as as you know, as the whole sort of program matures. But that's
Jacqueline Yu: Sounds like it's the right direction though.
Lisa Grimm: the thing, like directionally I'm like there's someone who's thought about this and someone who owns that.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: So I think, you know, E your point before about someone needs to be the steward of these things, you know, it's gotta have an owner.
E Keathley: Yeah, and I've seen the title I've seen the title knowledge manager applied to that position a few times. Data architect, knowledge manager, information architect. you see this role with several different titles across industries. And it is a way, if you're a digital asset manager, to grow into a higher paying role sometimes. For whatever reason. that person who is drawing out the workflows and everything, even though digital asset managers often do that, if that is a specific position within your information architecture, that position could pay another six figures on top of what you are making as a digital asset manager. Right. US, yes, another six figures US in the US. For whatever that's worth for whatever the inflation index was today.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, especially. And because that might sit in IT as well, which you know, yeah, in the US No, that's a Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: in the US. in the US. Yeah.
E Keathley: Yeah. so what I was
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: gonna ask is both of you were talking about this legacy tagging, these legacy metadata fields and how sometimes there is some, for lack of a better word, you know, dirty data in there and one of the great promises of AI in our field the entire time I've been here is that someday there's gonna be this magical AI that comes in and cleans this stuff for us. Have either of you
Lisa Grimm: He's
E Keathley: Seeing the reality of that promise, and if so, to what degree?
Jacqueline Yu: After you, Lisa.
Lisa Grimm: I saw a really good demo yesterday. I saw a demo. I did, I
E Keathley: You saw a demo. You saw a controlled environment? Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: did no, it was it was actually really cool, like how it was set up so I could see how this could potentially work. But you know, again, this is something where, like you said, control environment, it was trained on all the right kind of, you know,
E Keathley: Right.
Lisa Grimm: that that company's data, attributes, all of these things. In these sort
E Keathley: Right.
Lisa Grimm: of, you know, if you like, not even best case scenario, but good case scenarios, great, lots of opportunity for that. Well I I'm what I feel like I see a lot more at the moment is w we're gonna write a script to do, X or Y. Some of those scripts might be kind of vibe-coded, and Yeah, different things happen and then you do a lot of QA. So that's that's my that's my nice way of saying it at the moment. But that said, I d I do know that there are some really cool tools out there that people have been working on. people who who I trust in the field who I'm like, okay, I can see how this could work with again, that correct foundation. But I think you know again it has to be so specific. So that's where I keep coming back to. It's gotta have the the training and the right kind of underlying model. So
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah, I think... there's no magic tool. to clean data for you
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: because in order for AI to work properly, think it could potentially flag things that it doesn't look quite right.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: in terms of like doing content audit, it can't do it for you because a lot of it is, humans do human things when they come into entering metadata, especially when they have a free text, AI or whatever. Because what you mentioned, Lisa, about writing scripts, that's just automation. It's not,
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: there's nothing intelligent behind it, right?
E Keathley: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Exactly.
Jacqueline Yu: You set up business rules and stuff. what I think, you need to have a very specific... need. So before the recording of the session, I was giving Lisa an example of the replication of having a free text field. a particular agency managed to misspell its own company name about 20 times. So
Lisa Grimm: We love it.
Jacqueline Yu: I
E Keathley: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: think in that particular case, perhaps we could get these little tools to help clean it up and then do the changes on the background. But this
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: is a small time-saving activity that these tools can do for us. But ultimately it's about proper data governance. I don't know how to repeat this in different ways, but it's
Lisa Grimm: Right.
E Keathley: It's people. It's people.
Jacqueline Yu: all about making... Yeah, it is people. You know the triangle that we all get very sick and tired of, the technology people and processes? Technology can only do this much, man.
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
Jacqueline Yu: And then we talked about
E Keathley: It's the people.
Jacqueline Yu: processes earlier, and people can't just sit here and just like, know, I'm going to let technology and processes handle
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: everything. No, hence, we going back to change management again. We going back to the whole
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, exactly.
Jacqueline Yu: what's in it for you. yes, when you do training, make sure that you start with what's in it for you. And
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: that might get their attention better. But still, it's like, you will always get people like, well, I don't have time for this. Well, do you want to work to the relevant places? Like, you know,
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: it is it is is but but yes, to answer his question. We're not quite there yet. think
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: it's also we need to be careful about not blindly trusting what we see. I
Lisa Grimm: yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: think I was telling you ladies like before we started the recording about I got into an argument with co-pilot the other day trying to summarize
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
Jacqueline Yu: a training session I've got because I'm really bad at creating visual guides. Yeah, I'm artistically blind. So, yeah,
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
Jacqueline Yu: I have music degrees, but that's not visual.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: It's notoriously horrible at doing it. I thought, you know what, this is a good opportunity to use compiler to see what it's done. It started hallucinating information that I explicitly told them not to include. I ended up having
Lisa Grimm: yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: an hour argument with it,
E Keathley: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: especially depending on the model that you use or depending on the subscription level that you've got. They forget what you've discussed like 5.5. five prompts back so this is also
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: very important yeah verify everything and call them out of
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: it and the response is always great you are right
Lisa Grimm: Yes, it's always it's always like,
E Keathley: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: you're right, gosh darn it. And you're like, i it always feels so cheerful. I hate it, yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah, you will have to.
E Keathley: The vendors vendors for the last twenty years have told me that migrations are gonna be led by AI, that it's gonna be quick, it's gonna be so we're gonna take all the pain out of this. This is really what the where the AI is gonna excel, and I just haven't seen it pay off yet. I've seen it do really good really credible first passes. That's helpful. And I will say, since we've s we've slammed on Copilot once, I will say Copilot has been very helpful for me when you're going into an office environment where they're 365 heavy and finding hidden folders, locations for things, that I that has been super useful. So it does save time, but it's just another tool. It's not the answer. And the fact that these vendors are out here selling it as an answer to where you can also do staff reduction is just ridiculous. If anything, you're gonna need more staff.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. No, not we're not fan.
Jacqueline Yu: And if we don't clean data, you can't build all the really cool dashboards, the performance
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: tracking and usage reliably because you simply can't trust the data that you're seeing because they're always a missing pocket of assets sitting somewhere. know there are loads.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: where working and I know for sure that we are not the only people who have that problem. Yeah. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: yeah, yeah, there's always a migration sequel. It's like,
E Keathley: You're not. It's everybody.
Lisa Grimm: and all this other stuff that we found. and all this other stuff. And yeah, it it never it never ends. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
E Keathley: Because it's never done. There is no done. There is only next. Including
Jacqueline Yu: No, it's not. Yeah.
E Keathley: in migrations. It's just going to keep going.
Jacqueline Yu: Hey, job security guys.
Lisa Grimm: Hey, there we go. Well,
E Keathley: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: before before we leave it there, because I know Jack, you've got other things to do this evening and your day's just beginning as we're recording this, but I I definitely want to like leave folks with an idea of where where can they find you singing over the next couple weeks of months, or do you have any recordings you wanna you want to plug? Because we're we're all about
Jacqueline Yu: Come
Lisa Grimm: being, you know, multidisciplinary. So we're here for it.
Jacqueline Yu: I am not doing too many concerts until next year, but I'm singing Mahler too in North London in February, so that's cool.
Lisa Grimm: Very good.
Jacqueline Yu: I have a few videos of a previous performance on YouTube but I'm in general really really low profile on the internet.
Lisa Grimm: Fair. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's fair.
E Keathley: You're our second you're our second musician interview, Mary Katherine Barnes also performed. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: Lovely. that's amazing. Does she sing also?
E Keathley: Yeah, MK has been on the scene for years.
Jacqueline Yu: Beautiful.
E Keathley: out of Athens, Georgia, which is a huge music town
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: in the southeast. MK works in Atlanta, but musically is Athens based for music reasons.
Jacqueline Yu: Amazing.
E Keathley: yeah, but she has a a great band that she plays with sometimes. She has several different she has some solo stuff, she plays with different band, but my
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: favorite one that she does is called Al Gore's rhythm.
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
Jacqueline Yu: that's amazing.
E Keathley: And if I got that wrong, Mary Catherine, I'm sorry. But it still does it still
Lisa Grimm: That's funny.
E Keathley: does crack me up. The algorithm. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: I think the last DAM Europe conference that we had in June, I think we met quite a few musically inclined people, there
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: some singers, some instrumentalists, quite a lot. think our industry attracts all sort of artsy type to be honest.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We could definitely put together a quite good sort of chamber orchestra and you know, sort of madrubal group. So
E Keathley: Well, and I mean
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah, I'm still waiting for Thomas Dilling to bring his clarinet next time.
Lisa Grimm: There, there, gloves off, Thomas. You you heard. Bring Leclerc and that to the next thing. You're here.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah, I know. We'll talk about it.
E Keathley: Have you met David Diamond? who wrote another he wrote
Jacqueline Yu: I don't think I have none.
E Keathley: Yeah, David Diamond wrote Yeah,
Lisa Grimm: I I knew David back in the day, yeah, yeah.
E Keathley: David Diamond is another author in our field who's also worked in digital asset management. But when he was a very young man, he was in a very famous pop band called Berlin and they still tour every once in a while. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: They still tour? Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: There we go.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, in fact we were once
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: in a LinkedIn conversation. It was it was me, David Diamond, you know obviously several other people and Midge Ur. So I was like, this is wild that I'm having this
E Keathley: This is great.
Lisa Grimm: LinkedIn conversation with all these people. But it again, you're you're absolutely
Jacqueline Yu: Beautiful.
Lisa Grimm: right, Jack. Like this field attracts like all us kind of artsy weirdos. But you know, that's the fun thing too, is we've got yeah, you know, we again we could put together a really like top class improv group, you
Jacqueline Yu: I
Lisa Grimm: know, at the drop of a hat.
Jacqueline Yu: Fun fact is I sing better now. I musically, like artistically, I feel like I am in a much better space than
E Keathley: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: when I was trying to
Lisa Grimm: Mm.
Jacqueline Yu: do it full time or when I was in hospitality. I was tired all the time
Lisa Grimm: gosh, yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: trying to get auditions. Now I have a nice balance that I can be picky about the jobs that I do and it's a far more healthy balance. I get to exercise a different part of my brain. So
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: I highly recommend having a good balance and try different things out. That's what I tell people, it's like, I want to go into music full-time to do an undergrad. Now learn something else first and then come and do a post-grad music.
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
E Keathley: I met someone who works in one of the largest PIMs in the United States at the Portland Means Eat Up by chance a couple weeks ago. you never know.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah, exactly.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. Exactly. A hundred percent. Alright, well we w we'll wrap it up there. But I want to say again, thanks a lot. Again, E as ever. Thanks a lot, Jack. Folks, do follow us on the various things. Like, subscribe, comment. Feel free to hate watch if that's
Jacqueline Yu: you
Lisa Grimm: your thing too. We we take all sorts. We are we are not fussy. So we we we love it all. But I will say with that, thank you so much, and I will see you again next time. We will also well, at least two of us will see you again next time. So thanks for listening. Bye.
Jacqueline Yu: Thank you. Bye.
E Keathley: Mm.
Lisa Grimm: good books are sold or online or other other places as well. We're very happy this is out in the world. I'm Lisa Grimm, your host, and I'm joined by my intrepid co-host, Elizabeth Keathley. Elizabeth, how are you?
E Keathley: Great.
Lisa Grimm: Wonderful to see you, and we are very excited to have a special guest on today. We have the amazing Jacqueline or Jack Yu, who's gonna talk to us all about migration, also a little bit of how she got into this field, and because we all think we lead relatively interesting lives outside of you know work stuff, we're also gonna talk a little bit about what Jack does in her spare time, which she doesn't have much of because she's also got a small child and all the other things, but she is an opera singer, so we are gonna talk a little bit about the arts, because you know, we're all into this kind of But before we do I want to say Jack, how are you today? Welcome.
Jacqueline Yu: Well, very excited to be here. Thank you for having me. We're good. We just... We're in the hypercare period of rolling out a new DAM to replace our, I think it's a 15 year old DAM. So it's all been very busy and exciting, Lisa. I know we're going through something similar at the moment. So it's
Lisa Grimm: Yes.
Jacqueline Yu: all pretty good. We're just making sure everything's migrated over. So our topic today is completely relevant to what we're doing. Do I dream about it? Do we dream about it? I think we dream about it. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: absolutely, yeah. we're living and dreaming and breathing migration, which it's it's it's a whole it's a whole thing. Yeah, like like you
Jacqueline Yu: What even is that?
Lisa Grimm: say. Yeah, I'm in the middle of one as well. Fingers crossed, we're we're not to the hyper care yet. You're about a week or two ahead of us, so it's been interesting to be on a similar train, different platforms, different different things, but I think we'll we'll get to a lot of similar similar challenges and similar issues because there's a lot of stuff that you kinda whether you anticipate it or not just kinda seems to crop up. So we'll talk a little bit about that as we
Jacqueline Yu: Absolutely.
Lisa Grimm: get into the topic.
E Keathley: what system you're migrating from and to? And you can be as close
Jacqueline Yu: But we are...
E Keathley: about that as you want to be.
Jacqueline Yu: We are moving off from OpenText with whom we've been since 2012 or earlier and it was hosted on-premise with a very very old metadata model. and then I think well two three years ago, no 2022, four years ago, where did the time go man? We did
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
Jacqueline Yu: a server migration like from the hosting we were on ECL2 to a sure to us you so it's so this is like the second migration that I have done but not quite the same way yeah
E Keathley: was about to say yeah so you've already gone
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: from an on prem legacy system you move that to the cloud and now you're going to a new SaaS vendor right okay so
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah, absolutely. So that was fun.
E Keathley: you got you got a lot going on there.
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha
E Keathley: You have two separate migrations that have happened. You should feel really proud of yourself. It's a big deal.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, you're here.
Jacqueline Yu: I didn't do the heavy lifting, the guys did, you know, so that was great. No, thank you. How do we test?
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha
E Keathley: You're there. They can't do it without you, trust.
Lisa Grimm: Absolutely.
Jacqueline Yu: Making sure everything's fine, but thank you. It's been great. Yeah, they're very different migrations too, because one of them is to make sure that all the functionalities are fine. We didn't lose anything. And then this one, because we are building, well configuring a SaaS solution. then, so this time around, we have the whole metadata model, the security model to build. We've got making sure that all the things are working properly. And you know what things are, they never work perfectly.
Lisa Grimm: No, no.
E Keathley: Course not. The
Jacqueline Yu: So...
E Keathley: dream of automation is always always belied by the you know, the reality of the hands on corrective work afterwards, right? Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah, well we need to put people behind it. No magic button!
Lisa Grimm: exactly this. And then we this is why we're always advocating. You need the people to make this happen. So, you know, a hundred percent.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. And we'll we'll get into that, but before we do, let's let's do a little rewind, 'cause I think people find all of these paths into this strange world of Dan really interesting. So, Jack, tell us how you landed in this space. How did you get here?
Jacqueline Yu: Well, I did it completely by accident, actually.
Lisa Grimm: Normal, yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: So as you've... very kindly introduced me as doing something else. my degrees are in music actually, so I do still sing professionally. It's a shameless plug if are, if it's within the UK, if you have events that you need to hire, I'm available, contact me LinkedIn.
Lisa Grimm: You hear?
Jacqueline Yu: But it is a, so... Like all other musicians or struggling professionals who
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: worked in like, which we call it, hospitality, et cetera, et cetera. So we've got a lot of... side gigs and stuff. So I've done my stint in hospitality. By the way, I highly recommend anybody who work in DAM or any sort of product ownership, anything, do at least a short stint in hospitality. It helps with communication. It helps with
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: dealing with people, really learning what people want. And it could get you far further than you think it would. Not about programming
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, absolutely.
E Keathley: Yeah. And
Jacqueline Yu: languages. It's about how how to people. I benefited a lot. Yeah.
E Keathley: In library school, yeah. In library
Lisa Grimm: Hmm.
E Keathley: school, there's this whole concept of what's called a reference interview, which is just about
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: how do you talk to people who are looking for things and how to find out what they really need to find versus what
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: they think they're searching for. And that is so important when you're building a metadata model that's gonna query a collection correctly for the right audience. There's a thing that they think that they need and the thing they think they're asking for, and then the asset that they actually need. And being able to serve up that surprise of something better than what they thought they were going in for is really important. And you don't get that unless you have this, you know, hospitality skills
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: or reference interview skills.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, and
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, but like I said, otherwise you're learning how to people. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: I think everybody should learn how to people, right, especially in the current day and age. So I've done my time.
E Keathley: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: And I thought I should I I got bored because I had zero
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: ambition in hospitality I don't want to run a hotel. I don't want to I managed to learn
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: a lot. I picked up a lot of skills and I thought This is cool. I make a mean coffee despite not having caffeine at all. Yeah, we'll talk about it offline And
Lisa Grimm: Mm. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: then I I wanted to move into doing a a more like office-based kind of
Lisa Grimm: Hm.
Jacqueline Yu: work. I want to test myself in that area. And I talked to some recruitment agencies like staffing or talent agency and person said, I worked with this company called ICP. They're looking for somebody. I
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm.
Jacqueline Yu: think you should give it a go. And I had no idea what ICP did. I had no idea what digital asset management is, which
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha
Jacqueline Yu: is I've learned since that, which is very different from asset management, because if you work with asset management, you'll be far richer.
E Keathley: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: than what we are right now. So that was the beginning.
Lisa Grimm: That's true.
Jacqueline Yu: I think one more thing is... I was a school librarian when I was in primary school. I was single digit old when
E Keathley: Yay
Jacqueline Yu: I did my first librarian job. So we watched the library being built. so I grew up learning how to put covers on the books and there were different classification system and stuff. So it was really cool. So this is, you do it on computer, right? So that's how that works.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: So I thought this is is cool production company is also fun and and that's how I got into it in time for Covid. Okay imagine hospitality and music both were heavily hit so I'm still counting
Lisa Grimm: Yes. Dun dun dun. Yeah. absolutely.
Jacqueline Yu: my little lucky stars to be honest but but that's how
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: got it.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: Nice.
Lisa Grimm: my gosh, it's amazing. Yeah. And I always tell people too, like, especially when you're going to a conference or or you know, like you say, you're you've just been training people, like having that kind of background just gives you that ability to just be on in front of people and be ready to, you know, work through whatever gets thrown at you, whether the demo doesn't work or whether, you know, you're explaining something and you have, you know, someone who really doesn't like it, you you can you've got those sort of improvisational skills to just be able to roll with it. And I think it's it's massively, massively as as we know. Know underinvested in but also like underappreciated by kind of the powers that be. But I think it's it's so good for you. So
E Keathley: It is.
Jacqueline Yu: It is really handy because like seriously how many times did we have a perfect demo?
Lisa Grimm: yeah. We could talk about demos. Yeah. Sometimes you get a precanned perfect demo, but anyway, that's another that's another story. But
Jacqueline Yu: Exactly, so it's
E Keathley: Always
Jacqueline Yu: important.
E Keathley: if I have an important demo, I always have screenshots as a PowerPoint as backup. I've had too many
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: bad things happen to me over the years. I'm not gonna fall on my face. If something isn't happening, we're gonna say, Okay, there's gremlins in our internet connection today. I'm gonna go back to this canned slide thing that I have. Here's what happens. and nobody is gonna fault you out for that. If you have a screenshot
Lisa Grimm: absolutely.
E Keathley: screenshot PowerPoint as backup and it only makes you look more professional, honestly. They're like, well they're prepared. It's a nice thing to have. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, a hundred percent and yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: got Plan B, NCs and As.
Lisa Grimm: This is it it's funny how we're mentioning all these sort of be prepared, have a fallback plan because again we're talking about migration today and I think
E Keathley: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: you always need at sort of every step in the process, yeah, be prepared, have a fallback plan. What are you doing if X or Y doesn't work? So maybe if we wanna we we don't have to do the full airing of dirty laundry, because we've all been through multiple of of these, but I think there are some key themes that come up again and again and again. And I I will always start with, you know, so often we're either brought in midstream or Or you know, something else has happened first. So they haven't done necessarily that sort of content audit up front or the data cleansing up front. So you're like, we're gonna be doing it as we go. I'm just curious, you both of your perspectives, how you've seen this play out, how you know there's gonna be rework later, but how do you try to mitigate?
Jacqueline Yu: of the UE.
E Keathley: yeah. well, I think my favorite migration that I ever did was off of a very old video catalog system. And I'm not gonna say the vendor's name and you'll know why in a minute. And what this was was it was almost like a flat file. Like the videos were not attached to the catalog. It was just a catalog. And it was a catalog that went a h that went alongside a very popular video editing software and you could you could purchase from a third party vendor. this product that would catalog your videos off of this software. And of course I'm coming in and we're putting in a DAM. And so I need to get this video catalog from this third party. I need to get those records integrated into the DAM with video for the first time and make everybody very happy. We can click on the catalog and not just see the record but have the video right there. And I called the vendor because I'd heard that they had some new solution that also had video in it. And I wanted to see if this is something where I could do a portal and maybe do it side by side. Maybe there's an easier way to do this. Maybe we don't have to break a contract. Let's figure out what we can do with a UI. And I called him and he didn't know who I was. And he didn't know what a v digital asset management system was. And he made me tell him who I was two or three times. And he like, What is your background? And of course he's only used to dealing with video production people. I tell him, you know, this all, you know, my philosophy in this comes out of library science. I come from a library background. This is what we're building. This is what we're doing. And he goes, librarians, I thought you were just little old ladies in cardigans who played with puppets. And I went, Ha ha ha ha ha. And that was the exact moment when I knew I was killing his contract.
Lisa Grimm: ha ha yeah.
E Keathley: And I mean, I already kind of knew that I was gonna do that because he had no idea
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: what we were talking about or what we were trying to do, which was also sort of mind blowing. I think that this one company had gotten so fat off this automatic cataloging software off this very popular video editing program that they weren't used to having to fight for their money. They weren't used to having to fight for clients.
Lisa Grimm: Right, right.
E Keathley: They were like, no, we're just plug and play to this popular video editing platform. Easy sell, right? And a few months later, after I had killed their contract and I had like come through and was negotiating at the end of our contract to pull out all the metadata from this
Lisa Grimm: Mm.
E Keathley: legacy system, I was like, Okay, and I've gone through your contract and it says that you give us the option to buy out the records. And they were like, We don't do that. And I was like, Yes, you do. Here it is. It says right here
Lisa Grimm: Right.
E Keathley: that you do. So you need to give me a price right now because we're doing this. You know, and they weren't used
Jacqueline Yu: librarians read.
E Keathley: to people being able to do that either.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: they just weren't used they just weren't ready for me. Like they had never had anybody just come
Lisa Grimm: Right.
E Keathley: in and just like, Okay, well, we're yanking everything. Sorry. And when we're yanking everything, we're not gonna re catalog it. We're gonna give you you're gonna give it to me so that I can run ETL. And you know, another rep called me and the guy on the phone who had said the first thing to me, was there and he was like, Well, we just wanna understand why you're leaving. And like and I went through the thing and I explained
Lisa Grimm: Sure.
E Keathley: what I did and they're like and and they like and you talked to him about this. You told him you were doing this. I like, Yeah and then he told me that he thought librarians were little ladies in cardigans who played with puppets
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha
E Keathley: and that's when I knew that you guys just really weren't ready to handle what we're gonna do. And like there was just silence on the phone. And they were like,
Jacqueline Yu: Mic drop.
E Keathley: Okay. And
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: I had I had my records the next day.
Lisa Grimm: wow. That's okay, that's pretty impressive.
E Keathley: It was twenty th yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: amazing.
E Keathley: It was twenty thousand records and I had in an XML flat file and they were exactly what they needed to be. And then we pulled over.
Lisa Grimm: wow. Didn't have to
Jacqueline Yu: for a moment.
Lisa Grimm: like pull it out of an Excel or anything. They were just what you Amazing. Living the dream.
E Keathley: No. They I've they were done. They knew I wasn't gonna mess around and they were gonna give it to me. I had to pay twenty thousand dollars for it 'cause that was in the
Lisa Grimm: Sure.
E Keathley: contract price and I'm sure that contracts were rewritten after that for it to be more difficult. yeah. yeah, for sure.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: Everybody got something out, yeah?
Lisa Grimm: yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I have a cardigan, it's just you know, it's not been cool enough. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: We wear glasses, not cardigans.
E Keathley: I love my cardigans. I have a whole collection. They're
Lisa Grimm: Sometimes my cat will sit in
E Keathley: arranged by color.
Lisa Grimm: the pocket of my cardigan, but you know, not today.
E Keathley: Nice.
Lisa Grimm: It's it's too warm. So
Jacqueline Yu: Very nice. Yeah.
E Keathley: Classic.
Lisa Grimm: yeah. It's it's pretty good. It's pretty good. Highly recommend
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: as a as a fashion choice. But yeah,
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: no, I I think that's you know, i again just thinking about the data piece, it's so important because you know it's
Jacqueline Yu: yeah.
Lisa Grimm: it's easy to visualize the lift and shift if it's e if you are indeed doing a lift and shift. Although we'll say folks, if you are doing the lift and shift, you're not taking the time to go through and say, do I still need this? Do I still need this?
E Keathley: That's true.
Lisa Grimm: You know Can I map this more effectively? So sometimes you can build that in along the way, but I I've always found whenever someone says, it's gonna be fine, we're just gonna lift and shift it, something either goes wrong with how it maps from one system to another, or just in terms of like, again, you're losing opportunities to potentially say, but could we do this more effectively? Could we have a better model? Could we have something that's going to, you know, more effectively think about our upstream or downstream systems? So I think, and again, I think that's a situation a lot of people are finding themselves. themselves in now of moving from something that was kind of a standalone or maybe integrated to a CMS
E Keathley: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: into a much bigger ecosystem and then it's like what what are all the implications and have we thought about them versus just going from system A to system B? So
Jacqueline Yu: So I have some... fund learnings in my current project. So yeah,
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha ha.
E Keathley: Please share, Jack. That's why you're here.
Jacqueline Yu: so our current setup, so even before the implementation of the new DAM, we already have a very good, very close integration with our CMS and thus the CDNs too. so we've just implemented our product information management system slash, well, they can also handle a master data management kind of situation. So it's newly implemented. Not quite tried, not quite tested with integrating with other systems. I think there are integration with SFCC, the Salesforce Commerce
Lisa Grimm: Mm.
Jacqueline Yu: Cloud, if I get it right.
E Keathley: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: yeah, SFCC is what they've got with the econ people to do that. So they have that kind of integration, but what they have been trying to use assets, they're still using the CDN links that are not integrated. the DAM because they knew
Lisa Grimm: Mm.
Jacqueline Yu: that the DAM is getting, well we are redoing everything, burning the whole thing down. Content delivery network.
E Keathley: And C D N is and C D N is. Okay, great.
Jacqueline Yu: So the CDN, should I give a very quick explanation? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
E Keathley: Yeah, so you have a master, you have a master data platform, right? Metadata management platform. And feeding into that, you have a PIM, which is a product management system. You have a Salesforce. What else did you have? Uh-huh. Right? Which is your website, right?
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah, yeah, which is the econ things. And then we've got a CMS and then a Dan. Yeah. And then we've got, our CMS actually does a lot of publishing beyond just the website. We handle translation and
E Keathley: Sure. As you do as you do, yeah, nice.
Lisa Grimm: okay, interesting. Yeah, yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: unstructured content too. We have our CMS is with Tridion.
E Keathley: Nice.
Lisa Grimm: Okay, yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: So RWS now I think is... before was SDL. people, yeah,
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: we are very loyal customers. to a lot of companies.
E Keathley: Okay. And and S D L is right, and S D L is
Lisa Grimm: You invest in those legacy systems, yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: It was the company name. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
E Keathley: All right. Good. We're gonna get all our acronyms out here so people know what we're talking about. So you're really talking about right. So what we're really
Lisa Grimm: Yes. And there are a lot of them. There are a lot. Yeah.
E Keathley: talking about, Jack, which is this makes me so happy, is that you're explaining
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: a larger information architecture that DAM fits into, which is something that we haven't talked about on these podcasts yet, and how complex it can get. And this is such
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: a great example of that. I love the fact that, you know, you have a CMS involved in that. In many large organizations, a CMS is completely separate and it's often another world, you know, and they're doing their own thing just because sometimes brand management and website management can be two completely different hands in a company that don't necessarily talk to each other, crazy as that seems, it's not uncommon.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: So that's wonderful that you're part of an entirely integrated ecosystem of an information architecture that's well thought out. That's
Jacqueline Yu: Thank you.
E Keathley: rare and awesome and super cool that you get to work with it.
Jacqueline Yu: We are working on integrating with these systems. So, thank you for that by the way. So we've got,
E Keathley: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: so the MVP is to have the CMS and PIM integrating with the DAM so that
E Keathley: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: we don't need to manage our product launch cycle individually because that's what we've been doing before.
E Keathley: Nice.
Jacqueline Yu: And because we work on UTC and then
E Keathley: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: a lot of people don't understand UTC.
E Keathley: Okay,
Lisa Grimm: Hm.
E Keathley: so
Jacqueline Yu: we get like, isn't it just British
E Keathley: tell people what UTC is.
Jacqueline Yu: time? that universal time
E Keathley: Greenwich.
Jacqueline Yu: standard, yeah. No, no, no, Greenwich is GMT. Greenwich mean time. Yeah,
E Keathley: It's different? GMT. Okay.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, like
Jacqueline Yu: but UTC is a universal standard thing. They are basically the same, but then they mean different things, if that makes sense, because people think GMT just means like UK time. then daylight saving time is a thing. So we are current, so I am based in the UK. and We are currently still under British summer time. So we're actually an hour ahead of GMT, which is the Greenwich time, which is also the UTC time. Yeah, time is weird. So so people, you know, people can
Lisa Grimm: Wibbly wobbly, timey whimey. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: make mistake. So by having all of this product related information standardized coming from the PIM, all the changes only been made once. And if the PIM has an update, all other systems get update is very important to us because what what is time and launch cycle we we we need to make sure our product and assets and web pages are under wraps make sure that they're unpublished and still within staging until until the time comes so having discrepancies is it's a nightmare yeah let's not think about that yeah
E Keathley: Yeah, I actually I actually define time in our glossary in my first
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: two books. And Lisa, did we define time in the current book? Can you look real quick? Yeah, because and people were like, why did you put a definition of time
Lisa Grimm: But let me let me look and see if we did it. We do have a glossary, so.
Jacqueline Yu: You're done done done!
E Keathley: in there? And I was like, You have no idea. It's
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: so important. You're you're gonna be thinking about time in ways
Jacqueline Yu: This is why.
E Keathley: that doesn't that don't make any sense to a practical person and people will look at you like you have squirrels coming out of your ears. But time is so important and it's this concept that runs through digital asset management at a really deep level. When you get into it, when you are dealing with time and a digital asset management system, you have hit the upper level of what we do. It's a great do we have it, Lisa? We got it.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, you've we've got it. We've got it. Time, a dimension used to measure the progress in space and the duration of events. So take that sapphire and steel. But yes, we've got
E Keathley: So that we know what we're talking about.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah. Yeah. And...
Lisa Grimm: it we've we've got it defined. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: And earlier we talked about different systems that a company have. So whoever may be watching this, hopefully there are more people getting involved because you ladies are awesome.
E Keathley: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: We also have a design system, brand site, social media management platform, et
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm.
Jacqueline Yu: cetera, et cetera. And partner portal. We have sales partner, cetera, et cetera. Sales and enablement situation, more Salesforce. more oracle stuff you know it's
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: it's so they all well i mean we we all DAM ladies so you know not to toot our own horn here but the DAM actually
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: sits quite center of this
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: If we integrate with all these systems, well, first of all, usage rights, usage management would be much easier if we need to pull any products and expiry will be better. If we need to update anything, then. how no more downloading, re-uploading and then losing track of it. And do you remember back a few years ago before chat GBT and all that was all the rage? Well, blew up and before that, the focus I think off a lot of fenders was on content performance.
Lisa Grimm: yeah, yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah, right. Like, I think there are still vendors trying to solve it, like actively. I think we've seen some announcements coming from various vendors lately. But content performance had always been a thorn. Or
Lisa Grimm: Sure.
Jacqueline Yu: like the magic unicorn that people were trying to get to the holy grail of marketing or something like that,
E Keathley: The the metric that where we're gonna say it's not made up, we're gonna figure out this content performance metric
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: and it's gonna mean what we think it means. Yeah, it's really super elusive.
Jacqueline Yu: Yes. Yeah, something, something,
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: hi, something, something like, you know, all of it. So especially in the current climate, right. So so it's important that we need to make sure whatever we create is getting the result that we want. Let's be honest here, ladies. Do we clean up after ourselves well when we do testing or when we do publishing and stuff?
E Keathley: That is a great question. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: It depends.
Jacqueline Yu: doing.
E Keathley: I I think also this gets to the heart of something that Lisa and I were talking about with the guys at Georgia Tech. We did a really great podcast with them called Lost in the Stacks. And Charlie Bennett asked me, like, why were so many systems built with no cataloging or library or search in mind?
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: and I said something that I probably shouldn't have said, which is I said, I think search is a little bit gendered. You know, you have men writing these programs and then they don't know how to clean up after themselves. But then I thought about it more. I understand that's a little bit misandressed. Let us say that there's an entire class of people that aren't used to cleaning up after themselves. And so they build these systems and then they don't take care of the back end, which is the maintenance of it, the organization of it all, the having a place on a shelf. digitally for this thing to belong. You created the object. Did you just leave all the mess in the garage? Or did you find a place and
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: a shelf for it? And if you don't approach that holistically within these asset management environments, within this creative environment, you're right, Jack. We're not gonna have, you know, a clean system. We're gonna have all these tests out there and you have to clean as you go, or you end up as a hoarder, you know?
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, well it it it's funny because I've just come back from Product Content Europe, which is looking at things kind of from from the PIM side of the the fence, although obviously very much talking about integrated ecosystems, where does DAM fit in? Where where do does everything else fit in? And there were so many discussions that I think we've been having in the DAM space for years on, you know, again, your governance, how often are you going in and tidying things up? And and again, I don't want to say that these are new to the PIM space because I'm sure they've been having them all this time as well, but it was funny how How there was this real focus on novice, we want to have, you know, the the cleanest data we can possibly have, but how do you build that in? And sometimes you just have to get something over the line again, thinking about migration again. Sometimes it's not going to be perfect. How do you define what's good enough? You know, and then how do you build
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: in time for technical debt for that cleanup after? Because you can't just leave it. You still have to come and fix it. So
E Keathley: Right. So what what we're kinda dancing around here, Jack, is as you're doing your migration, you're doing a massive weeding, I'm assuming.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah, we did a two year long content auditing of all the assets. So I had a librarian to help us. Yeah. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: we love
E Keathley: Two years. Two years. And just to say this, like again, Jack took two years because Jack was doing the job correctly. When I see on a timeline that somebody's gonna do a content audit in ninety days, like no way, man. That's not happening. Like what yeah. But it's never a thousand assets, Jack. It's never
Lisa Grimm: Or a week, or yeah. Sure, that's true.
Jacqueline Yu: If you have a thousand assets then yeah sure but when you have like when you have hundreds of thousands no it's
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. Well, and
Jacqueline Yu: never
Lisa Grimm: actually to that point too, when we're talking about migration, 'cause you know, you're you're migrating from point A to point B, or you may might be migrating from points A, B, X, Y, Z, and a bunch in between that you don't
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: even know about or where they came from and and I think then you have this real call to make about how much are you as as the person, you know, as the as a DAM professional looking after this versus how much do you push back on business teams and say, You guys own this content, you need to tell me what's important Here are some guidelines you can use, but it's
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: it's always a it's always a battle. So
Jacqueline Yu: So what we've done is, well, in the nicest way possible. I adore a lot of people I work with and they are, they're like in the nicest way. Yeah,
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. You're like, not everyone is terrible, some people are nice. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: and you know what it's like, especially if you work in corporate, everybody is just like, I'm doing three people's job, right? So everybody's
Lisa Grimm: Of course.
Jacqueline Yu: doing three people's job. And I get it. But the thing is, guys, you own the content.
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: I can't tell you whether you're going to keep it or not, but what I can tell you is you're missing metadata in here, important ones, including like especially usage rights, because
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: without that, you can't use the asset at all because the asset is as good as useless. So, so yeah,
Lisa Grimm: Absolutely. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: so that's our holy grail. If it doesn't have usable, like understandable usage rights information that that that that that is that can be interpreted properly, then this asset has problems. and then she's like why can't you do it for me? She's like dude I'm not you I can't read your mind so yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, we don't know where it's come from, we don't know where you licensed it, you know, all that. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: I don't know. I don't I'm not involved in any content creation. I don't I don't talk to any of the creative agencies. You do. So unless you have that, we are not moving it. I don't care. So and then another thing. So so you need to do that. And then another thing is well, that's why I took two years because people take that long to get back to us. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, yeah.
E Keathley: They do.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah. And the ultimatum, you have to give ultimatum to people. It's just like if you don't
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: get this information to us by the time we need to do this, then it is not coming. And yeah. It is simple, that's. And of course, we would have people who are very focused on delivery and stuff like that. just, can't we park them somewhere? Can't we move them over and then we'll sort them out later? If we say we'll
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: Well that's an yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: do them later, we will never do them.
Lisa Grimm: Right.
E Keathley: Well, we we talked about that when we talked about workflow too and accountability. Like you can't
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: solve an HR problem with the system. There is a
Jacqueline Yu: No, no you can't.
E Keathley: certain HR component to this, like you're saying, where there's consequences
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: where it's like, No, you're giving it to us by the state or it's not going into the system. And of course,
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: you know, you you hope that they're not gonna go around you and make their own system. You know.
Lisa Grimm: Right.
E Keathley: you hope that you have enough management backs and
Jacqueline Yu: SharePine, boys!
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. Yeah. It's still in SharePoint, it's fine, right? Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: Sorry, sorry, but yes! Yeah.
E Keathley: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: Well, that's the whole thing. I think what we've also got is, I think earlier we talked about cleaning up after ourselves. It's not just
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: about test assets, because we touched on something about like CDN and CMS. I think a lot of people are trying to get the integration with. Pushing assets to the CDNs
E Keathley: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: is one thing, because that brings from a closed system to the domain, like public domain, that people can actually see all the cool stuff that we've done.
E Keathley: Be be explicit about
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: your C DN. What is it? Right.
Jacqueline Yu: our content delivery network. So what it is is... Your asset sits in your DAM, It's
E Keathley: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: a closed system. People need to log in to do it, selected people, et cetera, et cetera. But they need to go somewhere. So the CMS content management system, they do web publishing, et cetera, et If it's just text, it would be a very, very sad world. So they need all the videos, images, audio, all sort
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: of fun stuff. But what we've got in the DAM needed to be hosted somewhere to face publicly. we need to push all these assets to our content delivery network so that everybody else could actually see what we're talking about as part of the whole, well, that's the point. So
E Keathley: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: publishing these assets over had always been the focus. We don't have enough conversation about how do we pull those content off? How do we unpublish
Lisa Grimm: Mm, yeah.
E Keathley: Yeah. Expiry.
Jacqueline Yu: these bad boys? not just
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: expiry, but because if you replace them, right, it depending on how your CDN works. If you do a versioning, then that replaces the previous one, perhaps. if you, expiry is a great one, obviously, because you simply can't do that anymore. And then people worry about broken images. What about that?
Lisa Grimm: Yeah yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: get a bunch of like different dimensions, different context, have it replaced them for a while, you know, or get earlier notification. These are some of the solutions that we can then implemented but
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: we don't unpublish stuff enough and and and
Lisa Grimm: Mm, I agree. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: then the CDNs keep hosting all of these assets and then they can't keep growing and then they keep charging you more and more money
E Keathley: That's right.
Jacqueline Yu: yeah if you want to save money start unpublishing things
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, and that's the thing, the life cycle extends. Yeah.
E Keathley: Well, here's the thing though. So a business has a decision to make. They can pay someone to go through and do good asset stewardship, which is what they should do.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: Or they can pay that hosting fee. And unfortunately there's a calculation that some businesses make where they're like, Well, we'd rather just have old stuff out there than pay someone eighty thousand dollars a year to do that job and it is a full time job if the company's big enough.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Mm, absolutely.
E Keathley: And I hate that calculation because I, of course, think you should be paying someone eighty thousand dollars a year just to go through and do that part of the job and give them a window, you know, develop that new digital asset management talent. Start start with just that piece and move forward.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: I'm really wondering when the turnover and management philosophy is gonna happen. That people realize it's not worth having everybody see our trash out in public. 'Cause that's what it is,
Lisa Grimm: Right.
E Keathley: right? It's it's day old baked goods. Like it doesn't make your brand look good. You need to pay someone to be that cleaner.
Jacqueline Yu: Well, mean, if it's just on expiry alone, you get sued. We have all been sued before,
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: if we don't watch it.
E Keathley: everybody here.
Jacqueline Yu: So, and in France, it's triple, the damages are tripled. In some other countries, it's worse and some of them are far more strict. So you can't, and especially, so I work at an imaging company and come on, extra brand damage. So we need to make sure
Lisa Grimm: An imaging company. Yes.
Jacqueline Yu: everything is done properly. And yes, we invest in the time and energy to do it. Our IP team is great. our senior IP lawyer is one of my buddies and then we look at contracts like come on guys we've got let's let's do this yeah absolutely you learn so much yeah
Lisa Grimm: No, this is the thing. Always make friends with legal and compliance. They're just like they are here to help you. Absolutely. Yeah.
E Keathley: And and invest in learning how to read a contract yourself.
Jacqueline Yu: yeah
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: We standardize our MSAs with agencies
Lisa Grimm: good.
Jacqueline Yu: and then we mirrored that to our DAM so that it's very clear.
E Keathley: Nice.
Jacqueline Yu: With our new implementation, yeah, this is how I get job security, I think, because we are centralizing all the user's rights management. So
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: users, uploaders need to send us the rights template with or without that particular page in the contract and model release form and stuff
E Keathley: Right. Good.
Jacqueline Yu: like that so that we build a whole database in the new system so that it's easier for them to upload, minimizes the likelihood of them making a mistake because we are centralizing that bad boy for you.
Lisa Grimm: Yes.
Jacqueline Yu: so these are all like completely new changes. So when we map all these usage rights information to the new system, it gets very interesting because we are
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: in essence building a completely new metadata model.
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm.
Jacqueline Yu: And then we also found out that a lot of stuff that we don't
Lisa Grimm: yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: And then, and there are things that we do need, but it needs reorganizing.
Lisa Grimm: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Jacqueline Yu: And I think when people talk about migration, security model,
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: we did a giant overhaul of that too. So OpenText actually has a really good role user group and security policy management. But it wasn't set up. to our purpose. So we need to
Lisa Grimm: Sure.
Jacqueline Yu: rethink the whole thing and then see how the new system can accommodate or satisfy all the requirements that we've got. So that was a fun piece of work. But yes, it's not just about getting the asset over to the new system, but the whole governance, access. approval process workflow if you want to if you
E Keathley: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: can it depends on
Lisa Grimm: All of them, yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: how ambitious they've got and how the systems are going to interact with one another the ones that you're integrating with. which doesn't cause a problem between the old assets and the newly updated assets, well the newly uploaded assets to the new system, so that they wouldn't have a conflict. So all of these need to be... thought about and tested
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: properly. But I think all of these are something that people really need to think about. And when you do documentation, I know the whole save agile, whatever thingy thingy, it's like deliver first documentation is
E Keathley: You're right.
Jacqueline Yu: just whatever. I love documentation. I hate doing it, but it needs to be done. And
Lisa Grimm: It needs to be done, yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah, but we again like we do a lot of all the steps in order to get to the delivery part There's a huge missing Missing section is like we're gonna do when you don't need them anymore The whole the whole cleanup
Lisa Grimm: Mm, mm, mm. Yeah, exactly.
Jacqueline Yu: thing the unpublished bit the archiving the retiring the asset
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. Some of them will go to cold storage. What cold storage? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: get a cardigan. you know, it's not what's the blob storage? What even is that? You know, so so I think it's it's, it's really important to think about it because delivery doesn't end the moment the products
Lisa Grimm: Absolutely.
Jacqueline Yu: launched delivery. Like launching a new DAM doesn't end the moment the moment hyper care ends. And and I also don't think people talk about change management enough.
Lisa Grimm: Absolutely. Yeah.
E Keathley: Yeah, the myth of done is something that
Jacqueline Yu: What even is that?
E Keathley: people don't like to hear about. There is no done. There's only next.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, there's I mean it's a program, it's not a project. Exactly. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: It's a JIRA thing. It's a JIRA thing, you know, it
E Keathley: Yeah. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: needs to close tickets because we are into like opening tickets and closing tickets now. yes, yes, we
Lisa Grimm: And then you can track them. You have numbers, 'cause we love to have numbers. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: do. like, yeah.
E Keathley: Line go up. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. Yeah, mine go up, yeah. No.
Jacqueline Yu: And change management isn't just about training. It's about like a whole, why are we doing this? Getting into like... what are we doing and it's a new ways of working. It's not... migration never ends.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, no, exactly. And that and actually
E Keathley: So at least yeah.
Lisa Grimm: just on that point too, 'cause like you you can you know, you have an opportunity to train people as maybe their particular brands or sub you know, brands,
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: whatever are coming are being migrated and then you can help them, you know, have them come in to help, you know, maybe do QA, get them into the system. But you're right, it's not about that, here's how you log in, here's how you search day of training or, you know, fifteen minutes of training. It's about going back to them and saying, Okay, change management, what's working for you, what's not, what do you love, what do
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: you hate, and keeping them engaged and and again you're pointing About documentation, having their name somewhere on the racy where you're gonna keep coming back to them and saying, We need you to help us with phase two. We're gonna have a workshop in two months' time to say, you know, we want to revisit this or make this better for you, or you know, again, or faster. Like we want that, you know, that
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: constant sort of feedback, but you need that, you know, you need the you in the middle to say, okay, here's how we're going to sort of orchestrate all of that. Because while you're pulling in old content and putting in new content, you're trying to get people. on side too, so people.
E Keathley: So so Jack has talked about her migration. Lisa, what migr what type of migration in general that you can talk about are you doing right now?
Lisa Grimm: So the the way I'm putting it is we are the without naming names, migrating from a a kind of old school I would say super old school, old school, like we're not talking open text era, but but more recent, but
Jacqueline Yu: Haha!
Lisa Grimm: a a DAM that's much more brand portal solution, kind of standalone
E Keathley: Right.
Lisa Grimm: to enterprise integrated with a lot of different things. You know, we're standing up all at once, DAM, PIM, some other some other fun acronyms at the same time. So
E Keathley: Right. So you're taking that step in evolution up into architecture management from just having a DAM
Lisa Grimm: Exactly that.
E Keathley: where people specifically go to s to search for specific things to taking your place within an overall enterprise architecture management ecosystem.
Lisa Grimm: A hundred percent, yeah.
E Keathley: That's so great. That's you know, you saw the glee just pouring off of me as as Jack talked about the complexity of what she was doing. But you're and you're going
Lisa Grimm: It's exciting. It's a lot. But it's it's huge. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: into that step with them. That's so great.
Lisa Grimm: It's it's really exciting and again it's a big it's a big
E Keathley: Uh-huh.
Lisa Grimm: challenge, but it's been to the the nice thing is because it's not sort of the first time there's a DAM, my kind of myth busting means I have to come in to explain to people why this is different, why this is not just we we had this platform, now we have that platform. No, it's about why again it's all about the why. So I get to pull out my my favorite analogy where I get to tell people, What you had before was like a library, what we have now is more like the gym. Your assets are due Things they're becoming actionable within this new space. They're being served elsewhere downstream. They're doing things automagically. But that only works if after we've migrated them from system A to system B, that the data model is all working, that it's all you know going to the places we expect it to go, that all of the basic all the workflows we've set up are triggering the right kind of behaviors. but again, you know, this is the because we're not up and live yet, we're still in the part where we're seeing all the all the sort of dirty laundry and things that aren't quite. quite right yet, but at same time, when parts of it are working, you're like, it works. This is really exciting to see, you know, the downstream bits. But but I think again, to come back to the idea of cleanup, like I know I can't clean up everything I would want to clean up before we go live, but I do have been able to go around to people and get the commitments to say, okay, but in our next phases I'm building in all this time to do this specific subset of cleanup and this specific subset of cleanup. And people have been like, Great, rock on you do that. And And it's good to just you know have the support because it's not always there, so you have to really advocate for why it's also going to improve the user experience down the line. And the nice thing is some of it is obvious to people because when you've imported legacy metadata, sometimes and and this isn't even in only in this specific case, I've seen this in so many places, you're pulling in all of these old tags that were folksonomies or that were assigned by you know some sort of tooling or that have nothing to do with anything. Is that adding value?
Jacqueline Yu: free text. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Or free text, yeah. I mean probably
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: not. But do we have the time to clean it up at the moment? No. But it's also like we've got other strategies where you can say, Well, okay, the we're
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: we're filtering other ways, or we're serving content other ways, and then we can build in time to come back and say, Let's completely change how we do this. And it becomes a governance piece, so it's
E Keathley: So
Lisa Grimm: but it's exciting. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: Fixed forwards is a thing. Some of these can be fixed forwards. Some of them are non-negotiable.
E Keathley: So right.
Jacqueline Yu: A lot of them are showstoppers, but there are things that we can do down the line. there are that the new system could help us find those things easier. So
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: it is all very exciting. Can I ask, like in your current client, they have a data architect? Did I have somebody who managed their content model?
Lisa Grimm: So we actually have a couple people in that space. It's very exciting
Jacqueline Yu: Don't.
Lisa Grimm: to be working with them and I was I was a couple people both in-house and then from kind of the the system integrator side of things. So it but where of course it it's really helpful is to have someone who really understands that in-house what's where, what does it do? And
Jacqueline Yu: yeah.
Lisa Grimm: again, I wouldn't say we've solved all of it yet. There's still a lot that's you know needs to be defined as as you know, as the whole sort of program matures. But that's
Jacqueline Yu: Sounds like it's the right direction though.
Lisa Grimm: the thing, like directionally I'm like there's someone who's thought about this and someone who owns that.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: So I think, you know, E your point before about someone needs to be the steward of these things, you know, it's gotta have an owner.
E Keathley: Yeah, and I've seen the title I've seen the title knowledge manager applied to that position a few times. Data architect, knowledge manager, information architect. you see this role with several different titles across industries. And it is a way, if you're a digital asset manager, to grow into a higher paying role sometimes. For whatever reason. that person who is drawing out the workflows and everything, even though digital asset managers often do that, if that is a specific position within your information architecture, that position could pay another six figures on top of what you are making as a digital asset manager. Right. US, yes, another six figures US in the US. For whatever that's worth for whatever the inflation index was today.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, especially. And because that might sit in IT as well, which you know, yeah, in the US No, that's a Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: in the US. in the US. Yeah.
E Keathley: Yeah. so what I was
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
E Keathley: gonna ask is both of you were talking about this legacy tagging, these legacy metadata fields and how sometimes there is some, for lack of a better word, you know, dirty data in there and one of the great promises of AI in our field the entire time I've been here is that someday there's gonna be this magical AI that comes in and cleans this stuff for us. Have either of you
Lisa Grimm: He's
E Keathley: Seeing the reality of that promise, and if so, to what degree?
Jacqueline Yu: After you, Lisa.
Lisa Grimm: I saw a really good demo yesterday. I saw a demo. I did, I
E Keathley: You saw a demo. You saw a controlled environment? Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: did no, it was it was actually really cool, like how it was set up so I could see how this could potentially work. But you know, again, this is something where, like you said, control environment, it was trained on all the right kind of, you know,
E Keathley: Right.
Lisa Grimm: that that company's data, attributes, all of these things. In these sort
E Keathley: Right.
Lisa Grimm: of, you know, if you like, not even best case scenario, but good case scenarios, great, lots of opportunity for that. Well I I'm what I feel like I see a lot more at the moment is w we're gonna write a script to do, X or Y. Some of those scripts might be kind of vibe-coded, and Yeah, different things happen and then you do a lot of QA. So that's that's my that's my nice way of saying it at the moment. But that said, I d I do know that there are some really cool tools out there that people have been working on. people who who I trust in the field who I'm like, okay, I can see how this could work with again, that correct foundation. But I think you know again it has to be so specific. So that's where I keep coming back to. It's gotta have the the training and the right kind of underlying model. So
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah, I think... there's no magic tool. to clean data for you
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: because in order for AI to work properly, think it could potentially flag things that it doesn't look quite right.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: in terms of like doing content audit, it can't do it for you because a lot of it is, humans do human things when they come into entering metadata, especially when they have a free text, AI or whatever. Because what you mentioned, Lisa, about writing scripts, that's just automation. It's not,
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: there's nothing intelligent behind it, right?
E Keathley: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: Exactly.
Jacqueline Yu: You set up business rules and stuff. what I think, you need to have a very specific... need. So before the recording of the session, I was giving Lisa an example of the replication of having a free text field. a particular agency managed to misspell its own company name about 20 times. So
Lisa Grimm: We love it.
Jacqueline Yu: I
E Keathley: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: think in that particular case, perhaps we could get these little tools to help clean it up and then do the changes on the background. But this
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: is a small time-saving activity that these tools can do for us. But ultimately it's about proper data governance. I don't know how to repeat this in different ways, but it's
Lisa Grimm: Right.
E Keathley: It's people. It's people.
Jacqueline Yu: all about making... Yeah, it is people. You know the triangle that we all get very sick and tired of, the technology people and processes? Technology can only do this much, man.
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
Jacqueline Yu: And then we talked about
E Keathley: It's the people.
Jacqueline Yu: processes earlier, and people can't just sit here and just like, know, I'm going to let technology and processes handle
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: everything. No, hence, we going back to change management again. We going back to the whole
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, exactly.
Jacqueline Yu: what's in it for you. yes, when you do training, make sure that you start with what's in it for you. And
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: that might get their attention better. But still, it's like, you will always get people like, well, I don't have time for this. Well, do you want to work to the relevant places? Like, you know,
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: it is it is is but but yes, to answer his question. We're not quite there yet. think
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: it's also we need to be careful about not blindly trusting what we see. I
Lisa Grimm: yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: think I was telling you ladies like before we started the recording about I got into an argument with co-pilot the other day trying to summarize
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
Jacqueline Yu: a training session I've got because I'm really bad at creating visual guides. Yeah, I'm artistically blind. So, yeah,
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
Jacqueline Yu: I have music degrees, but that's not visual.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: It's notoriously horrible at doing it. I thought, you know what, this is a good opportunity to use compiler to see what it's done. It started hallucinating information that I explicitly told them not to include. I ended up having
Lisa Grimm: yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: an hour argument with it,
E Keathley: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: especially depending on the model that you use or depending on the subscription level that you've got. They forget what you've discussed like 5.5. five prompts back so this is also
Lisa Grimm: Right.
Jacqueline Yu: very important yeah verify everything and call them out of
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: it and the response is always great you are right
Lisa Grimm: Yes, it's always it's always like,
E Keathley: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: you're right, gosh darn it. And you're like, i it always feels so cheerful. I hate it, yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah, you will have to.
E Keathley: The vendors vendors for the last twenty years have told me that migrations are gonna be led by AI, that it's gonna be quick, it's gonna be so we're gonna take all the pain out of this. This is really what the where the AI is gonna excel, and I just haven't seen it pay off yet. I've seen it do really good really credible first passes. That's helpful. And I will say, since we've s we've slammed on Copilot once, I will say Copilot has been very helpful for me when you're going into an office environment where they're 365 heavy and finding hidden folders, locations for things, that I that has been super useful. So it does save time, but it's just another tool. It's not the answer. And the fact that these vendors are out here selling it as an answer to where you can also do staff reduction is just ridiculous. If anything, you're gonna need more staff.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. No, not we're not fan.
Jacqueline Yu: And if we don't clean data, you can't build all the really cool dashboards, the performance
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: tracking and usage reliably because you simply can't trust the data that you're seeing because they're always a missing pocket of assets sitting somewhere. know there are loads.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: where working and I know for sure that we are not the only people who have that problem. Yeah. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: yeah, yeah, there's always a migration sequel. It's like,
E Keathley: You're not. It's everybody.
Lisa Grimm: and all this other stuff that we found. and all this other stuff. And yeah, it it never it never ends. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
E Keathley: Because it's never done. There is no done. There is only next. Including
Jacqueline Yu: No, it's not. Yeah.
E Keathley: in migrations. It's just going to keep going.
Jacqueline Yu: Hey, job security guys.
Lisa Grimm: Hey, there we go. Well,
E Keathley: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: before before we leave it there, because I know Jack, you've got other things to do this evening and your day's just beginning as we're recording this, but I I definitely want to like leave folks with an idea of where where can they find you singing over the next couple weeks of months, or do you have any recordings you wanna you want to plug? Because we're we're all about
Jacqueline Yu: Come
Lisa Grimm: being, you know, multidisciplinary. So we're here for it.
Jacqueline Yu: I am not doing too many concerts until next year, but I'm singing Mahler too in North London in February, so that's cool.
Lisa Grimm: Very good.
Jacqueline Yu: I have a few videos of a previous performance on YouTube but I'm in general really really low profile on the internet.
Lisa Grimm: Fair. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's fair.
E Keathley: You're our second you're our second musician interview, Mary Katherine Barnes also performed. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: Lovely. that's amazing. Does she sing also?
E Keathley: Yeah, MK has been on the scene for years.
Jacqueline Yu: Beautiful.
E Keathley: out of Athens, Georgia, which is a huge music town
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: in the southeast. MK works in Atlanta, but musically is Athens based for music reasons.
Jacqueline Yu: Amazing.
E Keathley: yeah, but she has a a great band that she plays with sometimes. She has several different she has some solo stuff, she plays with different band, but my
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
E Keathley: favorite one that she does is called Al Gore's rhythm.
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
Jacqueline Yu: that's amazing.
E Keathley: And if I got that wrong, Mary Catherine, I'm sorry. But it still does it still
Lisa Grimm: That's funny.
E Keathley: does crack me up. The algorithm. Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: I think the last DAM Europe conference that we had in June, I think we met quite a few musically inclined people, there
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: some singers, some instrumentalists, quite a lot. think our industry attracts all sort of artsy type to be honest.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We could definitely put together a quite good sort of chamber orchestra and you know, sort of madrubal group. So
E Keathley: Well, and I mean
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah, I'm still waiting for Thomas Dilling to bring his clarinet next time.
Lisa Grimm: There, there, gloves off, Thomas. You you heard. Bring Leclerc and that to the next thing. You're here.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah, I know. We'll talk about it.
E Keathley: Have you met David Diamond? who wrote another he wrote
Jacqueline Yu: I don't think I have none.
E Keathley: Yeah, David Diamond wrote Yeah,
Lisa Grimm: I I knew David back in the day, yeah, yeah.
E Keathley: David Diamond is another author in our field who's also worked in digital asset management. But when he was a very young man, he was in a very famous pop band called Berlin and they still tour every once in a while. Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: They still tour? Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: There we go.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah, in fact we were once
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah.
Lisa Grimm: in a LinkedIn conversation. It was it was me, David Diamond, you know obviously several other people and Midge Ur. So I was like, this is wild that I'm having this
E Keathley: This is great.
Lisa Grimm: LinkedIn conversation with all these people. But it again, you're you're absolutely
Jacqueline Yu: Beautiful.
Lisa Grimm: right, Jack. Like this field attracts like all us kind of artsy weirdos. But you know, that's the fun thing too, is we've got yeah, you know, we again we could put together a really like top class improv group, you
Jacqueline Yu: I
Lisa Grimm: know, at the drop of a hat.
Jacqueline Yu: Fun fact is I sing better now. I musically, like artistically, I feel like I am in a much better space than
E Keathley: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: when I was trying to
Lisa Grimm: Mm.
Jacqueline Yu: do it full time or when I was in hospitality. I was tired all the time
Lisa Grimm: gosh, yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: trying to get auditions. Now I have a nice balance that I can be picky about the jobs that I do and it's a far more healthy balance. I get to exercise a different part of my brain. So
Lisa Grimm: Yeah.
Jacqueline Yu: I highly recommend having a good balance and try different things out. That's what I tell people, it's like, I want to go into music full-time to do an undergrad. Now learn something else first and then come and do a post-grad music.
Lisa Grimm: Ha ha ha.
E Keathley: I met someone who works in one of the largest PIMs in the United States at the Portland Means Eat Up by chance a couple weeks ago. you never know.
Jacqueline Yu: Yeah, exactly.
Lisa Grimm: Yeah. Exactly. A hundred percent. Alright, well we w we'll wrap it up there. But I want to say again, thanks a lot. Again, E as ever. Thanks a lot, Jack. Folks, do follow us on the various things. Like, subscribe, comment. Feel free to hate watch if that's
Jacqueline Yu: you
Lisa Grimm: your thing too. We we take all sorts. We are we are not fussy. So we we we love it all. But I will say with that, thank you so much, and I will see you again next time. We will also well, at least two of us will see you again next time. So thanks for listening. Bye.
Jacqueline Yu: Thank you. Bye.
