DAM Foundation: Ten Standards Badge

DAM Foundation, President, Mark Davey has written an article where he proposes 10 defining characteristics of  DAM systems.  The list appears to be derived from an article Elizabeth Keathley wrote which we covered last month on DAM News, but they have tightened up the list and made it a bit more specific:

“The following list is put forward for consideration of ratification by DAM Foundation board members. Once ratified, these ten characteristics will be used as a measure whereby DAM vendors can have their systems certified by the Foundation as DAMs.” [Read More]

I won’t list the entire ten items as you can read them on Mark’s article, but there is some discussion going on about it currently on LinkedIn (under the article itself).

I would agree with the vast majority of it.  They have possibly not given enough prominence to the reporting or business intelligence element, but there are references to those topics included and I don’t want to get into nit-picking about details as this is evidently something that will get refined and adapted over a period of time.

It will be interesting to see how this gets managed in terms of vendor accreditation, Mark has indicated it won’t be a ‘pay to play’ type of process, which is definitely a point in its favour.  Something like this requires cross-industry input and I think the vendors need to be involved in it too.  DAM has its fair share of self-appointed umpires (with varying degrees of plausibility) and an inclusive process seems like the best way to avoid arguments and get a more representative sample of opinions about what exactly constitutes a DAM system and whether a software application is truly worthy of that description.

I have discussed this elsewhere, but I think this endeavour will need to sub-divide into some subsidiary definitions before long.  Although there are still lots of DAM solutions that get used across a diverse range of DAM-related requirements, many vendors now appear to be implicitly selecting given use-cases to concentrate on, even though not all of them probably realise it yet.  Some are choosing to handle this via modules (whether built in-house or via integration with ancillary products) rather than entirely unique applications.  There are clearly some larger groups of end users such as marketing teams, but even within that segment I expect to see further specialisation and it might be both horizontal as well as vertical in nature.

Having some core competencies which are the basis for further on-going classifications makes logical sense and as Mark has mentioned, is another long overdue development for DAM considering it has been existence for nearly 25 years now.  We plan to keep track of progress with the 10 standards badge (along with other standards in play currently) and will report back on DAM News with any significant updates.

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