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A Better Workflow
Requiscat in pace
Once upon a time I was obsessed with technology and creative organizations
and the tools that bring creative people together
to improve their work lives and build positive business outcomes.
I pursued this for several years,
developing software, growing my DAM expertise,
solving hard digital workflow problems,
and sharing what I learned at every opportunity including as a conference speaker.
But eventually life changed, and I moved on to new horizons.
This site remains as an archive for my writings and bloggings over the years,
and a virtual tombstone for A Better Workflow.
What is A Better Workflow?
Creating digital workspaces that foster creative collaboration and campaign consistency is the prime objective of A BETTER WORKFLOW.
Businesses today sense a new urgency in developing marketing campaigns that speak with a coordinated, single message across all media. This work crosses the spectrum of creative and marketing activities. Now more than ever creative organizations need the right systems to help them achieve that holy grail of marketing — campaign consistency.
But a couple of things stand in the way.
Organizations are hindered by legacy team structures and mental frameworks that often divide the work according to types of outputs — motion graphics vs. web design vs. social media vs. print. There are more creative teams than ever and they continue to labor in autonomous and segmented silos. Meaningful dialog and cross-team collaboration are hindered by these historical structures.
Also, the digital toolset hasn’t kept up with the changing demands. Most often, the tools being used have been cobbled together over time, winding up with a handful of media management systems that each serve just one or two specific needs and have no relationship to each other. Gradually, operational inefficiencies become entrenched, and workflows bend around these awkward and inappropriate tools.
But users are no longer happy hopping in and out of a half-dozen disconnected tools that force them to work in ways that don’t match how the work actually gets done.
They need a platform that enables them accomplish — in one central place — essential tasks like presenting their creative ideas for review and approval, sharing, and communicating. They need a platform that helps them organize and keep track of all campaign elements… and which has been strategically designed to be in harmony with their unique needs and specific workflows.
Without effective means to keep the teams collaborating, or allowing marketing managers to visually manage the entire scope of a campaign, message fragmentation is a huge risk — a direct result of baked-in frictions and bottlenecks that amplify human error.
This is a huge roadblock to success. If a campaign somehow manages to be coherent and streamlined, it’s usually a testament to the human struggle and triumph over adversity. The sheer effort to achieve this is probably way harder than it ought to be.
The promise of a well planned and implemented solution is that it can make your creative team more effective, and the business more profitable.
This is where