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.
Beginning of a standards body for DAM via the DAM Foundation. This group meets for the first time in March 2011.
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.
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.
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.
DAM which works seamlessly with other customer tool sets via API will continue to gain popularity.
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.
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.
Let us say one group or department is the original requester of a DAM solution within an organization. Likely this same department becomes the business owner, stakeholder and/or sponsor of the DAM solution. This same department or group pays to administer and maintain the DAM. They might pay for any monthly/quarterly/annual licensing fees and/or service level agreements (SLA) for the DAM solution as well. Now let us say other departments see the value in using the DAM to keep the organization’s branding, graphics, photographs, publications, presentations, reports, video or other intellectual property (IP). The DAM gets more user adoption by more departments. Now who pays for the DAM within this organization?
Often, what occurs is the original requester, sponsor or stakeholder continues paying for the DAM solution. Because of this, they might say “Wait, I am paying out of my department’s budget for other departments to benefit from this solution as well? What’s in for me? Why should I pay for the DAM when the entire organization uses it?”
Consider this idea “Why am I the only one paying for it? If we share the DAM, share the cost.”
Enter the idea of chargeback or simply charging the department who requests to acquire/create/use something with the actual expense in resources used by refunding it. This idea is likely a change for many companies in how they deal with budgets and how departments are accountable for the resources they use. This also keeps a department which may overtax another department’s resources in check. So, with this idea every department or group has their own budget as usual, but since every DAM user should have a unique login (right?) and possible different collections of assets they can access or share, why not split the total cost of these expenses based on actual usage of the DAM solution per department? Charge each department based on usage of the DAM solution.
If one department uses the DAM more than another department by a measurable amount or percentage, should they pay a larger share of the cost each month/quarter/year? Should each department be able to share this cost evenly or should each department pay for what they use based on a percentage? Or have one department pay for it all?
I would recommend looking what you are paying for internally and externally to gauge what are the costs of doing business.
Some DAM vendors charge for bandwidth (how many GB is uploaded/downloaded to/from DAM within a given period). Some don’t.
Server space costs money regardless of whether it under your own IT department’s domain, a vendor’s domain or in the cloud. Who is using the storage space?
Some DAM vendors charge per DAM login or per concurrent user. Some DAM systems limit how many users you can have or the total users at one time. Can your organization add/remove DAM users without the vendor’s help?
How much does it cost to administer, support, maintain a DAM and train the DAM users? How much does it cost in errors and problems when you don’t?
Why should I pay for the DAM when the entire organization uses it?
Are these costs of doing business worth sharing as you share business tools such as a DAM solution?
Another DAM podcast is a weekly series of audio recordings which complement Another DAM blog. In September 2010, these podcasts began to appear with weekly interviews of different DAM professionals from around the world. Everyone interviewed have different stories to tell, information to share and is passionate about what they do. Some people interviewed are well-known in the practice of Digital Asset Management or related fields.
Every person interviewed is asked at least three similar questions:
How are they involved with Digital Asset Management
A question related to what they do
What advise would they give DAM Professionals or people aspiring to become DAM professionals
You can listen and even subscribe to this podcast series:
Do you want to pay licensing and/or support fees each year?
Do you really believe your organization can do it all yourselves without any outside assistance, from the beginning into the distant future? (that would mean the future in years. Not weeks.)
In the long-term, what type of solution are you willing to commit to?
Whatever you choose, you’ll need support for DAM operations, DAM users and updates for the DAM. Where will this ongoing support come from?
Do you have full documentation for your organization’s DAM system provided by…?
Does the solution work with third-party applications you need to use it with?
Is it easy to use? Or do you need a software engineering degree to understand how to turn it on and make it work?
Is it a scalable solution, regardless of how big your collections or organization grow?
Is it fully searchable?
Is it secure?
If you use a DAM within your organization, please answer the following poll.
Another DAM Blog 