The start of a new year is a time of optimism, with many people looking to achieve things they’ve been putting off for a while. As well as personal goals like fitness or finances, it’s a great time to get things done at work too.
Digital assets are a case in point. If you don’t have an asset management strategy, it’s easy for things to become cluttered and eventually unmanageable. The result is time wasted looking for the right asset and money wasted paying for extra storage space.
In this post, we’ll discuss how you can declutter your digital assets this year.
While cloud-based asset management systems offer potentially limitless storage capacity, it’s always good to stay on top of which assets you keep. Not least because that extra storage space could cost you more on an ongoing basis.
Before you start tidying up your assets, you should go through to see if there’s anything you really won’t use. Don’t delete assets just because you haven’t used them in a while. Remember that other colleagues may have a purpose for them too.
Some simple things to look out for include:
The next step is to tidy up the way your assets are stored and organised. There are a few options to choose from:
Project – Depending on how your organisation works, you could store assets by the project or client they’re related to.
Date – Another option is to create folders for each week, month or year.
Subject – In many cases, the most suitable way to organise assets is by their subject or purpose.
Whichever your choice, a hierarchical structure is usually best. Using dates as an example, it would start with something broad like “2021”, moving onto folders for each month, and then each week. For subject, on the other hand, you could start with broad categories like “advertising”, “print marketing”, moving onto “leaflets”.
Organising assets with a logical structure is just one part of the challenge. For maximum ease-of-use, assets should be searchable. This starts by giving assets the right metadata like tags and keywords (and of course choosing a system that allows you to add metadata).
What’s important here is that you have a strategy in place, which everyone sticks to. It’s no use labelling files for “marketing” when some staff are using “advertising” instead, for instance. Create a guide as you go, so your colleagues know how to store and organise assets going forwards – and you don’t end up needing a declutter year after year.
Having the right digital asset management is vital if you want to keep your assets secure, well organised and easily retrievable. iBase can help you do exactly that with our feature-rich software. If you’d like to learn more about the system and how it can help you, contact our team for a no-obligation one-to-one demo.
