The following are predictions about Digital Asset Management for 2011:

1. Significant increase in the use of DAM on mobile devices (tablets/smart phones).
2. More DAM education will be offered across North America and elsewhere.
3. More DAM professionals will become available to fill the growing need across industries. Professionals with experience will dominate the job market while others will still be volunteered from within.
4. Most information about DAM will be available online. More ebooks and podcasts will be available as well. Use of blogs will increase, especially in DAM education. Yes, even this blog.
5. Beginning of a standards body for DAM via the DAM Foundation. This group meets for the first time in March 2011.
6. The DAM community will continue to grow by leaving old guard model of exclusivity behind to become more open and sharing of  information about DAM to those who are interested.
7. Open Source will continue to slowly grow in popularity among the technically savvy users who clarify its documentation as well as its place in the market.
8. Usability will remain a need for every DAM user and DAM vendors who fulfil this need will continue to grow. DAM vendors will still need to prove functionality during thorough customer demos using the customer’s own test assets in real-time.
9. DAM which works seamlessly with other customer tool sets via API will continue to gain popularity.
10. Organizations will need to change (evolve and scale) in order to manage and deliver increasing more data and digital assets than ever before. Some such as book stores, internet companies and mobile phone companies will likely merge with others.
11. Clarification and knowledge about metadata (what it is and how to use it) will continue to spread as people and organization realize they need it more than ever (even though they have been using it for years elsewhere). Still, few will want to create it themselves.

I wrote these as a DAM user and admin who is active in the DAM Community. Let us see what happens by the end of 2011 and how many of these predictions become reality. Happy New Year.