Clarity on PLM

What I learned this week … was sparked by a conversation with a friend from the industry over a drink last night. We were discussing the cloud, PLM, multitouch, and IT in general. To be fair, there were other topics of conversation, but he is one of the people that I really respect for his insight into technology. We were discussing my thoughts on PLM in the Cloud, when it finally struck me. Are we going to ruin the design process for experienced engineers by hampering their real-time interaction with the system? Are we heading in the right direction for tomorrow’s engineers?

What Am I Talking About?

Work with me for a minute, this conversation was after only one beer so I think it makes a lot of sense. We were talking about what kids today will expect in the user interface of the future. We were talking about how our kids talk on their headsets and use their game controllers so naturally, doing things we don’t even understand. They are pushing combinations and series of buttons in rapid succession to make things happen in their game – in their virtual world. Then it struck me – why am I so excited about multi-touch and user interfaces that help replicate the real world? Isn’t the whole point of using a computer to go beyond what you can do manually? To super-enable your abilities?

OK, back to CAD and PLM.  Multitouch, 3D manipulation, and motion interfaces are cool. We all saw Iron Man, and we have seen demonstrations of multi-touch CAD. Now I am asking “so what?” OK, I love multitouch (and I want an iPad). But I have a tablet PC with a touch-sensitive screen, and how often do I pull my hands off of the keyboard to touch the screen (hint, no fingerprints on it)? I don’t even like to take my fingers off of the keyboard to grab the mouse, so I have learned a lot of shortcut keys and typeahead tricks. Why? I don’t want to replicate getting a blank piece of paper out of my desk, writing a report on it, making copies, manually distribute it to colleagues for review, and then file it in a file cabinet. The real world is much less efficient than my virtual computer world, so why replicate it in my user interface? OK, we all know the answer. It reduces the learning curve, and it makes interaction more intuitive. But for the experienced user I am going to call that assumption into question (translate as you will).

For the experience user – particularly for the people that grew up using Xbox controllers to manipulate their virtual world in ways they can’t dream of interacting in the real world – we need to do better. Don’t make them touch the screen, take advantage of the fact that they have ten fingers that can all act independently. Give them a motion-sensitive Wii/Xbox-type of controller that they can do ten things at a time with. Track their eye motion. Read their brain waves. The point is to most effectively translate and extend the ideas in the designer’s mind to the system. For the first-time user, multi-touch makes sense. For marketing presentations, the same. For a  day-to-day, interactive interface between an engineer’s fast-moving brain and their high-powered computing equipment it has to be fast and efficient for the experienced user – and that doesn’t necessarily mean natural or intuitive. Particularly when the definition of “intuitive” changes as more of the Xbox generation is sitting in front of the CAD system.

What Does This Have to do with The Cloud?

OK, if you are still with me I appreciate it. I know this has gotten long, and I haven’t even touched on the cloud yet. I will make this brief. I pointed out two types of concerns in my post on PLM and the cloud. One set of concerns was corporate, the other was performance for the user. Let’s relate the concepts above to the real-time performance of an engineer. A lot of the buzz around CAD in the cloud has discussed the challenge of rendering graphics rapidly and getting them back to the engineer. That is a big concern, and I have seen in posts like Josh Ming’s post on SolidSmack about SolidWorks on the cloud that progress is being made.

But what about input performance?  If the goal is to make the human-machine interface as efficient as possible and not distract the engineer from innovating, there can’t be a lag between action and reaction. Part of that lag time is computing/rendering responses. The other is capturing what they are doing. This is where I get concerned about lag times in the cloud. Maybe I need to look back at my son’s Xbox experience and just get over it? But I still have a lingering concern about maintaining real-time user-machine interfaces through the Cloud. I know a lot can be done client-side on the PC or workstation, but I still have to wonder if we are heading the right direction for the real design jocks. Maybe it is too much to ask engineers to learn that level of interaction with their systems, but won’t the Xbox-controller-wielding generation expect that, and won’t it be intuitive to them? If X-A-B-Y-LR-LR-X means pass the football in their game, why couldn’t they learn that means create a thumbnail of my 3D model and check it into the PLM system? Then, I am confident that powerful computing infrastructure (in the cloud or elsewhere) can execute on that.

Implications for Manufacturers

I realize that I may not have given you much that is actionable today, so I will leave you with a thought or two to ponder. All of the new UI ideas are cool, and there are huge benefits for companies to move applications to the cloud. But try before you buy. In your environment. With your infrastructure. And your people. And keep the capabilities of bright, highly talented, gaming savvy, trained, dedicated engineers in mind as you evaluate future user interfaces. Multitouch will have great uses in engineering software, and cloud computing has great promise. But let’s be careful what we ask for so we don’t hamper our future innovators. And for goodness sake, let’s make sure we don’t make them put their hands on the screen unless it is really helping them do something more natural (like sketching) that they can’t do better with an Xbox controller.

So those are my (somewhat random) thoughts, I hope you found them interesting. Do you agree? I didn’t, if you did let us know about it.

What I learned this week … is a reaction to some of the buzz coming out of SolidWorks World this year. I am not attending the event, but there has been a lot of good reporting from SolidSmack, Ray Kurland, Derrek Cooper,  and others. The word of Day 1, it seems, was “Cloud.” So much in fact that @rtara (Roopinder Tara) suggested on Twitter a new drinking where there are shots taken every time somebody said the word. So now “PLM” and “Cloud” are official buzz. I have not spent much time on this, so I thought I would use this post as a starting point. Is this a brave new world, or just another buzzword to throw around?

The Buzz

Don’t get me wrong, buzz is not bad. As long as their is beef behind the buzz. OK, not that I have hopelessly mixed my metaphors, let’s do some definition.

• Cloud (from Wikipedia, where else?) – Cloud Computing is Internet- (“cloud-”) based development and use of computer technology.  In concept, it is a paradigm shift whereby details are abstracted from the users who no longer have need of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure “in the cloud” that supports them. Cloud computing describes a new supplement, consumption and delivery model for IT services based on the Internet, and it typically involves the provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources as a service over the Internet.
• Cloud (greatly simplified by me) – Is your data and your applications out on the Internet.

It’s not as mysterious as it sounds, data and applications aren’t randomly dispersed, they are just outside of your organization with service provider(s). Any online application can be considered “Cloud Computing.” Amazon is in the cloud. What’s new is that we are talking enterprise applications in the cloud. And even that isn’t so new, salesforce.com is CRM in the cloud, in a “software as a service” or “SaaS” mode. Seems like we could demystify this a bit, no?

So why is there so much buzz? Wouldn’t it be nice to move all of your IT problems outside to someone else? Why wouldn’t you want someone else to worry about capacity, bandwidth, security, OS upgrades, hardware upgrades, etc.? Oleg has also written a lot about the cloud in PLM Twine.

Buzz Kill

So why wouldn’t the cloud make sense? It lowers costs, simplifies infrastructure, and generally relieves a lot of IT burden from the enterprise. I will offer two perspectives:

• Users Want Performance – For the most part, users don’t care where there data is. But they want to be able to get to there information when they need it, and they want it to be available rapidly. If data (and applications) move to the Internet they will need to maintain an acceptable level of performance. For example, I have two e-mail accounts. One I control on my client, the other is “in the cloud.” When my PC decides to download a new virus definition my Internet-based e-mail slows down. Not just downloading/uploading from my client (which is a bit of a pain), but actually typing an e-mail. The same is true as I am writing this blog post. If my bandwidth goes down or my laptop starts hogging resources for something else, I lose my focus on what I am writing and have to focus on getting the words on the page. If I get distracted by performance issues when trying to write a post or an e-mail, how distracting would it be to an engineer trying to solve a design problem?
• Corporations Need Control – Of course we would like to move our IT problems to someone else. But who can we trust? Who will we work with if the performance our users demand isn’t there? Is it the application service provider’s issue, our Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) problem, our network? How do we guarantee our precious product data is safe? Can we trust our service provider’s employees? Is there more inherent risk when my data and my competitors’ data is on the same infrastructure? Facebook made a mistake and gave access to profile data to the wrong people. Oops. What if that was your CAD data? These are just a few of the questions.

None of the issues are insurmountable. We are moving this direction. It has been an evolution, but more and more of what we do is happening off or our personal machines and outside of our firewall. I do think that trend will continue for cost and simplicity purposes. But the infrastructure and business models for the cloud are just developing for areas like PLM. Stay tuned.

Implications for Manufacturers

The implications from my perspective are clear:

• The Cloud is Compelling
• The Cloud Must Perform
• The Cloud Must be Able to Answer some Serious Corporate IT Questions

Look for evolution when it comes to moving PLM to the cloud, not revolution.

So those are some early thoughts on PLM and the Cloud, I hope you found it interesting. This will be an interesting evolution to see unfold. There will be bumps in the road (maybe some big ones), but the benefits are compelling. What do you think? Are you ready to give it a try? Have you?