Widen Employees Talk DAM

Over on the Widen blog this week, they have an interview with three of their employees.  As a general rule, I find these ‘meet the staff’ type of posts that some companies go in for to be a an embarrassing form of ritualised employee humiliation that manages to combine the most obnoxious elements of HR and marketing into one very dull package.  On this occasion, however, Widen’s attempt at the format is both useful and interesting.  If you were looking for a model of how to handle these things, you could do much worse than copy their method.

The three Widen staff are: Chris Rewey, Craig Bollig and Brenna Hale.  They are asked six questions about DAM:

1. What are the most common questions you’re asked today by organizations looking for a DAM solution?
2. How do those questions differ from one or two years ago? Or are they the same?
3. What feelings are people experiencing when they reach out to Widen? What’s weighing heaviest on their minds?
4. What topics are up for discussion these days? What’s your POV on those topics?
5. Where do you see DAM going in the next two years? What kinds of questions do you anticipate organizations asking you in the future as a result of things happening in the marketplace?
6. What advice do you have for organizations who realize they need a DAM solution?

This is their response to question 5 (I have edited parts of this to keep the length down):

“DAM as a whole, the platform, will be more specialized on core DAM and we’ll see more opportunities for plugins. The expectation will be application-based and then being able to push a button to download the other tools you need.  The conversation about the API will also be more important, as a result. There will be recipes for making use of the API for plugins that don’t exist yet. We’ll be sharing more customer stories about the API in use and development.  DAM is not a stand alone piece of software. It may have been treated that way a few years back. In the future, it will become more invisible. People may interact with assets, but they won’t necessarily login to a DAM solution to have that interaction. Seeing, consuming, and sharing of the assets will come from any number of other places.  I think we’ll see more integration and user experience questions. People will continue to build on the quest to integrate with the systems they’re already using.” [Read More]

As you can see from this excerpt, they go into some reasonable depth about the topics.  In no small part is this down to having a good set of questions to start with, but what is also obvious is that the staff both know and care about the Digital Asset Management subject.  It’s more considered and thoughtful than the text equivalent of a lot of high-fiving and whooping about how great their system is, you get to see their firm’s thought processes and why they have made certain strategic decisions.

A lot of the time when you read vendor material, it becomes apparent that the staff are just painting by numbers and you could swap “Digital Asset Management” for some other technology and still get the same result.  You don’t get that sense reading this interview and that is what makes it both useful for readers and a great piece of marketing for Widen – the two concepts should be mutually inclusive.  I would have to say, I’m not a fan of some of their other information materials, but this one is noteworthy for all the right reasons and it’s well worth checking out.

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