David Diamond – Reinventing Digital Asset Management:

“No matter how pretty the UI, a DAM remains a place people must go to get what they need. We place digital assets in a repository that is almost certainly not where we are when we actually need those assets.

[…] We want digital asset access, not from some random website location, but from within our apps and anywhere else we happen to be — Google plus, a Disqus comments thread, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

[…] Best-of-breed enables customers to choose which system components they prefer. Instead, we are now seeing vendors buy up and package complete suites for us to consume, lock stock and barrel.

[…] DAM became about marketing for some DAM vendors when they realized that marketing departments had more money than universities and museums.

[…] Digital asset management needs to replace the OS file system entirely.”

I'd love to think about this a bit longer, but I have to go repaint our DAM Lite UI now...