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Asset governance

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When you author guides, you use a range of assets, in addition to text, to create intuitive and effective instructions. The assets fall into three categories:

  • Self-produced assets, such as globally approved company logos or a video where an experienced operator shows hand gesture best practices for machine operation.
  • Externally produced assets, such as an illustration or picture that originated from a paper-based or digitized user manual that your company's machine supplier produced.
  • Hybrid assets that your organization and an external partner co-create, such as a 3D computer-aided design (CAD) model that your organization creates based on a supplier's drawing of a machine part.

Your organization should govern the individual assets and keep them compliant, just as it does for the authored guides as a whole. Make sure that the rights to use the assets are in place, and that the assets are always updated to the latest version. For this purpose, your organization should consider the following questions, among others:

  • Do you have the intellectual property rights (IPRs) to use the assets? IPRs are relevant for externally produced assets and hybrid assets.

    Tip

    When you procure new machinery, make sure that your organization's rights of use also apply to machine drawings.

  • If you have the IPRs, what are the potential usage restrictions? Is the location of usage limited to specific countries, regions, or factories? Are the IPRs limited in time?

  • In your organization, who will ownership of the asset be assigned to (from a technical and practical point of view)?

  • How will you ensure that the asset owner gets requests to remove the asset from the content library or replace it with a newer version? For example, usage rights might be revoked, or your company logo might be updated. For externally produced assets and hybrid assets, consider setting up a governance structure where your procurement section acts as a link between a supplier and your asset owner. In this context, it's important that asset owners keep an overview of where their assets are used (that is, in which guides), so that they can identify guides that are affected by changes.

  • How will you ensure that guide authors are notified about removed or updated assets, so that they can revise guides accordingly? Establish a workflow between your asset owners and guide authors.

  • What naming conventions will support asset governance? By incorporating information such as the asset type, expiration date, and geo-restrictions into asset names, you help asset owners and guide authors appropriately handle the assets.

In the early stages of a Dynamics 365 Guides implementation, asset governance might seem redundant, because the project team is close to all processes. However, without asset governance, it will become difficult to maintain assets over time, as Guides usage scales throughout your organization and machine parts (including manuals) become obsolete and replaced. Use of outdated assets in guides is likely to be non-compliant with your industry's Good {industry} Practice (GxP) requirements.

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