Case study: so many assets, so little time

79,000 digital assets. Images. Videos. PDFs. All the content that fueled the multifaceted, multilingual marketing efforts of Baptist Health South Florida, the region’s largest not-for-profit healthcare organization. This asset collection represented millions of hours of work, driving campaigns from display to social to print. All sitting in their legacy DAM. 

And Baptist Health’s license for that legacy digital asset management (DAM) provider was about to expire. They'd taken the transformative step of moving to Adobe Experience Manager Assets. They'd made the decision to take advantage of AEM's significant feature enhancements and connectivity across the Adobe ecosystem. They were doing the smart thing to optimize their content supply chain.

But the clock was ticking. If they couldn't get it all done, from discovery to AEM implementation to migration, before that license expired, all 79,000 of those assets would just disappear.

That's when they called WNDYR.

A complex organization serving diverse populations

We'd met before. In 2021, WNDYR helped Baptist Health implement Adobe Workfront as their operating system of record (OSR). This involved coordinating and automating workflows across an intricate array of siloed teams and stakeholders. And we mean intricate.

With 12 hospitals, 4,500 physicians, and some 28,000 employees, Baptist Health has, to put it mildly, a lot going on. Their services range from urgent care centers and doctor's offices to internationally renowned institutes specializing in cancer care, brain and spine care, heart and vascular care, and orthopedic care.

Baptist Health’s marketing is equally complex, including not only standard internal teams like marketing communications, web experience and creative services but also dedicated teams supporting individual service lines. 

Moreover, the population that Baptist Health serves is among the most diverse in the country. In the Miami metro area, a majority of residents speak a language other than English at home, and 40% of the population was born outside the United States. 

This kaleidoscopic variety of services and demographics demands a sophisticated marketing operation to get the right messages to the right people in Baptist Health’s community. It's possible now to deliver exactly those kinds of highly personalized experiences. But not with Baptist Health’s previous solution and configuration.

Growing pains

Their existing DAM had three big issues. First, it was a bit of a mess. As so often happens, legacy implementation design and neglected data hygiene meant it was hard to find anything in that mountain of content. File structure conventions and metadata were inconsistent at best and nonexistent at worst. This meant a lot of wasted time and rework when the right asset couldn't be quickly located.

Also, the old DAM was limited in customizability and flexibility. Baptist Health found themselves constrained by their DAM, not empowered by it. For instance, their DAM didn't allow them to serve assets directly to external agency partners, a crucial function for a fast-paced marketing operation.

A third pain point was that the DAM didn't work easily with all the other tools used by their teams. While Baptist Health’s adoption of Adobe Workfront had significantly reduced friction and time-to-market, their legacy DAM still demanded a lot of context-switching and swivel-chairing by content producers. 

It all added up to a waste Baptist Health could no longer afford if their marketing efforts were going to keep pace with their growth and vision.

The need for speed

Implementing AEM Assets as the new DAM was the right solution to those problems. Less clear was how to pull- off implementation on such a tight timeline.

From the start, WNDYR worked hand-in-hand with Baptist Health to ensure that decisions were made quickly and the project stayed on track. We started with focused discovery sessions and interviews with senior stakeholders, project owners, and designers.

WNDYR's Jason Goodrich with our partners at BHSF. Of course he's smiling: he's in Miami.

That told us what we needed to know to create migration scripts for the client's legacy DAM. We preserved the client's assets and metadata, staging them in a cloud storage bucket before the old license expired.

Whew! The most urgent issue was solved. Those 79,000 assets were safe. But there still wasn't a moment to spare. If BHSF was going to make this transition without disrupting their marketing operations, we had a lot of work to do.

Organized is optimized

We knew that just replicating their messy old setup wouldn't be good enough. AEM enablement included new metadata schemas and programmatically created folders for the assets to reside in. What's more, we enriched the metadata for the existing assets by deriving new metadata from multiple legacy sources.

So when the assets landed in their new home in AEM, they were not only more intuitively organized but were instantly more discoverable through enriched metadata that didn’t exist in their legacy DAM.

But certainly, as teams produced more assets on tight deadlines, the administrative work of maintaining consistent metadata would slip, right? Not with native Workfront integration. 

Much of the organizational metadata they care most about is already present within Workfront, through its Portfolio > Program > Project hierarchy, and its custom form features. So nearly all of the metadata attributes needed to optimize discoverability in the DAM will be automatically applied when approved assets are moved into the DAM via the integration and its synced folders. 

Finally, by also enabling connection with Adobe Creative Cloud, content creators can do everything from browse assets, to make their files available for review, to mark their tasks complete - all without leaving their Creative Cloud applications. If someone works most of the time in Photoshop or Premiere, they can now do all that admin work right there on the same platform.

AEM Assets was now fully enabled and integrated. Baptist Health’s vast content collection was safely stored and organized. We'd done it! 

And then we had to do it again.

An internal IT-led technical reorganization meant that AEM had to be re-enabled and the file import had to be re-run. You never expect a thing like that, but the unexpected is why WNDYR has robust data preservation safeguards. We were able to rerun the entire import with very little impact on budget and no impact on timeline.

It takes two to make a thing go right

Through it all, Baptist Health stayed focused and resilient through the turbulence of a major enterprise transition. WNDYR prides ourselves on working as part of a client's internal team. We couldn't have asked for a better partner.

Because of the tight, inflexible deadline, we had to make the decision early to backlog several enhanced features. While Baptist Health has ambitious transformational goals, they've been pragmatic about taking an iterative, early-and-often approach to delivering incremental feature enhancement.

They also understand that adoption is at least half the battle. Change management and training have been given their due, which is a big deal in an organization that produces so much, so fast.

In the coming months, WNDYR will be adding some of those backlogged features and helping BHSF grow into their new capabilities. We've also identified some potential process automations leveraging Workfront Fusion. We have our eye on some additional possibilities for streamlining video production, too.

And the exciting thing is, we've only scratched the surface of what Baptist Health could do with the native Workfront-AEM Assets integration. We look forward to unlocking more possibilities together.