Anjali Yakkundi from Forester offers some interesting insights about current digital asset management (DAM) technologies in the market. Most of DAM vendors are either struggling to adopt new digital trends or unable to respond to new type of requirements.

Poor Usability

Surprisingly, usability remains biggest DAM challenge for existing as well as new users and buyers. For most DAM offerings there are opportunities for improvements in usability and UI design. Apart from UI design, for many DAM users findability is another major usability concern. Typically poor findability is just reflection of poor metadata management offered by DAM technologies. Like spreadsheets, usability of DAM offerings are uninspiring.

DAM vendors treat asset management as glorified Excel spreadsheets.

Lack of open architectures: APIs & web services

Most of DAM offerings are falling short when it comes to integration with the existing ecosystem of digital experience tools and marketing execution platforms. There is an urgent need for powerful APIs and web services to allow direct access to all kinds of DAM functionality and media assets programmatically. Currently integration with DAM systems is really painful and manual experience.

Marketing Execution Platforms a key trend in the DAM. Image Credits @ADAM.

The DAM silo has burst, and vendors are scrambling to integrate.

Current digital boom is all about integrations and solutions. Lack of open architecture and integration means, most of vendor can only offer technology, but not solutions.

Missing Adaptability: Multi-channel and Multi-device

With rise of multi-channel and multi-device, digital assets management requires a different approach to serve unlimited media variations to huge number of channels and devices dynamically. This also requires on demand delivery of adaptive and personalised media.

To cater these needs, dynamic media platforms like Adobe Scene7 are emerging in the market. These dynamic media platforms are not replacement for DAM systems. Again, effectiveness of these dynamic media platforms is limited by integration with DAM systems to synchronise the digital assets.

In nutshell

These are some immediate concerns for DAM technologies in 2014.