Yes, it’s happened. Since the first month of posts are published, I feel comfortable using the “dam as DAM” metaphor.
During the pandemic, my family and I hiked every Sunday. It started as a stress relief during the early days when our apartment echoed with ambulances taking covid patients to nearby hospitals and we stayed inside banging pots for our health workers. Lucky enough to have a car, we’d escape the city each Sunday morning to check out a new spot for exercise and maskless time in safe fresh air. One Sunday we drove up to Croton Dam for our weekly hike.
Now I generally eye-roll the DAM = dam analogies, but what hit me on the hike (once we finished the muddy ascent and I had the mental awareness back to think anything about anything) was the under the surface dam/DAM similarities. If I have placed Encanto’s “Surface Pressure” in your head, good, we’ll come back to that later.
Look at that water at the top of the photo. Calm, smooth, untroubled, placid. Giving water to the city downstream, reflecting trees nourished on its shores. If you had cropped the photo just showing the reservoir, it would be pretty, but wouldn’t tell the whole story.
Like your DAM, most people only see the surface. You have built it (or plan to build it) to contain and share assets in a simple, clean, easy-to-use way. Your users see the result of hours of pre-planning, building, structuring and maintaining that happened without their effort. Under the surface, the DAM is functioning to serve up the metadata you input, the search response you optimize and the permissions you devised - reminds me of the dam, and also a swan gliding across the water, feet paddling frantically under the water.
Look at that stone spillway, with some of the water rushing over orderly steps some making its way over rough rocks. This particular dam is not hydroelectric. If it were, it could capture energy when water flowed downstream over those steps.
So, this particular dam could remind you of your DAM right now. What information could you be capturing downstream? What steps do you need to build to harness that info? How can you further refine and improve the steps to get more power from your DAM? Who do you need to involve to create a powerful dam? How to you minimize the overflow going over the rocks that gives you no energy?
Now back to that Surface Pressure from Encanto reference. How do you avoid too much pressure building up?
Pressure, like a drip, drip, drip that'll never stop, whoa
Pressure that'll tip, tip, tip 'til you just go pop, whoa, oh, ohPressure like a grip, grip, grip, and it won't let go, whoa
Pressure like a tick, tick, tick 'til it's ready to blow, whoa, oh, oh
How can you avoid feeling like Luisa (or that swan above)?
First, recognize that this pressure exists. If you are a DAM owner, oftentimes you are the sole provider within your organization. While some lead a team, in my experience, DAM can live within marketing, IT, content or creative services teams with a single owner. Like with a dam, a DAM with a single point of release can quickly overflow.
Next, try to figure out how you can offload access, workload and ownership to a larger team of superusers and DAM champions and lessen that pressure. It’s not just about burnout (although it’s not, not, about burnout), it’s about getting the most out of your DAM as well. Try to find ways to remove bottlenecks early and often in your DAM strategy.
The result - you release some of the pressure and increase the value the DAM can generate along the way.