DAM Vendor Selection – Time For A Change?
DAM consultants, Daydream, have written a blog post where they consider the role of Digital Asset Management selection consultancies and offer some advice to purchasing managers. They consider 5 areas where vendor selection consultants can potentially arrive at decisions that are not necessarily to the benefit of their clients:
- Charging vendors to appear in evaluation reports
- Incomplete knowledge of the Digital Asset Management market
- Buying the cheapest option rather than the best value
- Having a financial interest in one of the vendors
- Relying on the same lists of vendors without due consideration of their client’s needs
They also suggest a method to reduce the risks which is for selection consultants to remain involved through the duration of the whole delivery process and have responsibility for obtaining maximum ROI from the DAM system they have helped to choose:
“Software engineering is difficult. The implementation of a DAM system involves complex planning, coding, testing and refinement by a highly skilled team of people across many disciplines. Further, ensuring that an organisation is able to exploit the full potential of their DAM system once implemented is an equally complex task. Often this activity is labelled ‘change management’ and sidelined as ‘stuff that happens afterwards’ rather than being at the forefront of the procurement process when the system is initially considered. This is where the DAM vendor selection industry is well positioned to provide high quality, results-orientated services to their clients. By working with clients to design strategies for full service delivery, rather than simply selecting a vendor at the starting line, consultants would be able to support those critical initial decisions made over the longer term, and clients would be able to benefit from a similar ‘results-orientated’ service as they do from vendors.” [Read More]
The perspective is interesting, not least because one is more used to hearing from consultancies about the short-comings of the vendor market rather than the opposite direction. As I discussed in previous posts, however, the real issue is the way that clients themselves tend to purchase software and the outmoded methods many use for procurement that make this proposal more complex to operate. Until there is some revision to those practices, creditable though this suggestion is, I cannot see how it will be practically achieved. I do have to acknowledge the wider economic picture which Daydream also refer to and that fact, as well as the rise of Cloud alternatives to monolithic ECM systems, could be the catalyst for change, however.
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