Today we added to our growing range of Digital Asset Management Whitepapers a new report aimed at purchasing managers who have to review DAM systems as part of a corporate purchasing exercise. “DAM System Reviews: A Buyer’s Guide To Procurement Best Practices” describes a framework we have used in our consulting work that helps businesses to focus on the business case for a DAM system and rationalise down many of the vast number of DAM product options now on the market.
Being in the somewhat rare position of having both helped clients to buy products and also acted as vendors of DAM implementation services ourselves, we been able to observe the process from both sides and this has informed our report and enabled us to see more clearly what works and what does not.
We have structured the paper around providing answers to a number of common questions about reviewing DAM system to decide what one to buy:
- Who are the end users?
- What do they really want?
- What is the business case?
- What will the impact on the business be?
- Who are the candidate vendors?
- How should we manage the selection process?
- Once we have decided on a vendor, how should we proceed?
Although the questions seem simple enough, the answers (especially to the first four) are anything but. I don’t think it has gone unnoticed in the DAM industry that there appears to be an excess of choice for buyers in the form of increased number of vendors and divergence in what different people mean when they refer to something as a “DAM System”.
Many prospective buyers are confused about what they should expect and how to narrow down the options to help them choose between different products that may be radically different from each other but share the same Digital Asset Management description. Despite the more specific terminology, the situation is only marginally better in related disciplines like Brand Asset Management, Marketing Resource Management, Enterprise Content Management or Media Asset Management (the quantity of examples itself speaks volumes).
We at Daydream think it is in the interests of the whole industry that buyers are able to concentrate more easily on products that directly answer their specific business needs. Education is vitally important to help end users understand how to relate features and product choices back to their own circumstances and we hope this paper will go some way towards enabling them to achieve that objective.
