Clarity on PLM

A quick peek into some research on … on social computing for product development. Why does Facebook miss the mark? Can it be fixed? I have been talking for some time about the potential value of social computing in PLM and have mentioned before why Facebook will fail. I am preparing for a presentation next week, and decided to pull my thoughts together. So here they are, I look forward to your feedback.

The Research Findings

There are two parts to the findings. The first is a list of concerns that I have heard, here is a short list:

• What relevance do status comments and photos have to do with serious engineering?
• How will we protect intellectual property?
• What does Facebook know about business processes or how to manage them?
• What does Facebook know about engineering data? CAD files? Projects? Engineering in general?
• Why would I trust my business performance to a technology platform like Facebook that doesn’t appear stable or perform well (sorry Facebook, that is just my practical experience not a sound technical analysis)?
• How do I have time to pay attention to this in addition to everything I already do?
• How do we address security concerns?

OK, part two. Can it be fixed? Yes, but I doubt they will do it. There are two reasons:

• They are not focused on this and don’t have domain expertise
• They don’t have the ability to connect to the underlying context, the product data

But let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. Let’s see what Facebook can teach us about PLM. Here are my thoughts (and if you happen to be in Helsinki next week stop by to see this live):

Implications for Manufacturers

Don’t look to tools like Facebook to help you with social computing in PLM. But don’t discount the concepts. Learn from them. They are compelling. And manufacturers are getting started. In fact, I look forward to sharing research that I am doing with Kalypso that gives some great insight on what companies have been doing.

So that was a quick peek into some recent research on Facebook failing in PLM, I hope you found it interesting. Yes, I know they didn’t design to tool for product development, so I am really not picking on them. Does the research reflect your experiences? Do you see it differently? Let us know what it looks like from your perspective.

Please feel free to review more free research and white papers about PLM and other enterprise software for manufacturers from Tech-Clarity.

A quick peek into some research (and some “mythbusting”) on a post by Christopher Null on Yahoo News titled “Facebook and business don’t necessarily mix.” Great, catchy headline. But does it really reflect the underlying research from MIT? I don’t think so. I will also share some comments posted on the PDMA blog from a study by Kalypso that don’t sync up with the commentary. And, I will provide an opportunity for you to speak your mind by participating in a current research study on social media and product innovation.

Commentary and Reactions

I don’t know the author of the post, but when I read it something didn’t sit right with me. For the most part, maybe it was that the title of the post didn’t match the underlying premise. To be fair, I know that some editorial gets “help” with their titles to grab attention (which this one certainly did, at least to me). But here are my thoughts (and feel free to “bust” them yourself, I realize I don’t own all the right answers).

Facebook and Business Don’t Necessarily Mix (Busted) – OK, I know I am picking on the title. But let’s own up to two realities:

1. You don’t have a choice. People on social networks are going to talk about your products. Whether you initiate the conversations or someone else does (customers or competitors), it is going to happen. As the post in PDMA ”Do you use social media in innovation?” points out, Social media on your terms is a much better idea than letting others take control of it for you. You MUST get ahead of this.

2. This isn’t what the MIT research says. The post Mr. Null references, “Pitch may fail on Facebook – Study: Social media don’t always create good buzz“, is much more aptly titled. What is says is that buzz can be positive or negative, and that it can actually hurt sales. According to the Boston Herald blog, the research (which I haven’t read, and is not published yet as far as I know) quotes the author as saying that “found that online buzz only helps when new products are at least half as good as consumers expected.” Now that is interesting! The author, P.J. Lamberson, an MIT Sloan School of Management visiting assistant professor, is said to use math to study large networks.

“Conventional Wisdom” (Plausible) – Mr. Null starts his article with “conventional wisdom now holds that if you want to have a successful product launch, you need to exploit Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace to get the word out about your product.” Is this really conventional wisdom? Are most companies using social media today? My experience says no, but I could be wrong. I will admit, my focus is more on social computing for product innovation, product development, and engineering (PLM) and not product launch. But my experience says that companies are experimenting with the use of social media, but it is far from standard operating procedure. The only evidence I have is from some preliminary results from the study being run by Kalypso (Disclosure: I am helping them run the study) that indicates that the use of social networking and social computing in product launches is still not fully developed. In fact, only about 1/2 of companies are using social media for product launch. Further, companies that are using social media are only using it on a small percentage of their initiatives. In other words, we are very early in the use of social media, and it is far from conventional wisdom. On the other hand, the preliminary results show that about 90% of companies that are using social media for innovation are planning to increase usage next year, with none indicating they were reducing it.  Why is this Plausible and not Busted? The research is not done – please participate in the survey and I will share results back with you via the blog.

Bottom Line (Busted) – After being generous with the last mark, I was fully planning to Confirm the post’s bottom line. Then I read it again to copy it here, and I disagree. “The bottom line is simple: Viral marketing, in which a conversation about a product is actively encouraged, can turn good or bad in ways that traditional marketing and advertising typically cannot. Unless a business pays careful attention to the tone of that conversation, the company could find itself shelling out millions on a viral ad campaign, only to have the unwanted effect of decreasing sales instead of increasing them.” I copied the whole comment over, because I agree with the first part. Yes, viral marketing can turn bad. But then it says business need to pay attention to the tone of the conversation. The underlying study (from what I can see) doesn’t say that. It says that your products have to meet expectations. In other words, it’s saying you can’t just manage the tone because it is out of your control.

Implications for Manufacturers
So what should manufacturers do? Learn from the study. What I hear is don’t over-hype your products, and don’t try to push a bad product through social media. It seems to me the harder you push how great a product is, the more likely you are to get dissenting view from customers. The study doesn’t say your product has to be good, it just has to meet expectations at least half-way.

Continue to experiment and learn. Social media is changing the way we interact with products. Be a part of the change and experiment. The last bit or preliminary data I will share from the Kalypso study is that those that are doing it are seeing business benefits (revenue, time to market, reduced cost). This is real, get on it.

So that was a quick peek into some recent research on social networking and business, I hope you found it interesting. Does the research reflect your experiences? Do you see it differently? Let us know what it looks like from your perspective. Please feel free to review free research and white papers about product innovation and product development from Tech-Clarity.

A quick peek into some research on … the use of social computing and “Web 2.0″ techniques to enhance product collaboration. The report, Issue in Focus: Product Collaboration 2.0 - Using Social Computing Techniques to Create Corporate Social Networks not only discusses how social media and Internet-based technologies can improve product collaboration in corporate social networks, but also how manufacturers’ use of social computing allows them to capture and leverage the interactions as a new source of corporate product knowledge.

The Research Findings

One of the key messages of the report is that companies are starting to embrace social computing and “Web 2.0” capabilities to take advantage of social media for business purposes, creating “corporate social networks.” It is important for many companies to make a clear distinction between personal use of social media (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, etc.) and “real work” using social computing. While many large companies have shut down access to social media sites, these same concepts offer the ability for engineers, product developers, marketers, manufacturing resources, sourcing, and others in the product innovation process to share and contribute.

There are two primary threads to the research:

• Improving Collaboration – As reported in my previous post and research Going Social with Product Development, capabilities like presence detection and interactive file sharing help make existing collaborative processes better. This is particularly important to replace the day-to-day “water cooler” conversations that have disappeared in today’s globally dispersed, virtual organizations and support processes such as concurrent engineering. For example, manufacturers can create a virtual “community space” to give team members a central location for information. This collaboration extends beyond Engineering as well, and helps product developers include downstream considerations from Manufacturing, Purchasing, Quality, Service, and other departments early in the design process.
• Capturing Product Knowledge – Another key finding of the research is that as manufacturers adopt social computing in PLM, they are developing a digital record of the product development process. Decisions, discussions, false starts, brainstorms, and other interactions can now be captured and stored electronically. Using PLM, they can also be associated to the product and the project to form a permanent record of the process. By integrating this social interaction with search capabilities in PLM (see Unlock My Product Data! Business Intelligence in PLM), the potential to turn collaboration into a corporate asset is tremendous. Beyond capturing internal knowledge, corporate social networks can also be used to collaborate with suppliers and customers to gain better insights into the “voice of the customer,” capture requirements, and generate new product ideas - developing new knowledge and intellectual property (IP).

Implications for Manufacturers

There are significant business benefits to be unlocked by applying social computing techniques to product development. Manufacturers have an opportunity to improve collaboration inside and outside of the enterprise by leveraging these new techniques. After all, social computing is about sharing content within a community. Isn’t that what collaboration is all about? Sharing and getting feedback? And while the thought of using Facebook or Twitter to share your intellectual property may not sound that appealing (as we discussed in Flogging the Facebook for Product Development Horse), the same concepts are being applied to (and integrated with) PLM.  I believe that these capabilities will be a big part of product innovation moving forward, and that companies that get started sooner will have a big advantage over their peers. This is a new and exciting frontier, and we all need to explore and learn so we can tap the new potential ahead of the competition.

So that was a quick peek into some recent research on social computing and collaboration, I hope you found it interesting. Does the research reflect your experiences? Do you see it differently? What are your plans? Let us know what it looks like from your perspective.

And as always, please feel free to review more free research and white papers about PLM and other enterprise software for manufacturers from Tech-Clarity.

What I learned this week … was sparked by some recent social networking announcements on people tagging. The most recent was that Facebook plans to offer tagging very similar to what Twitter offers. This follows other announcements around geo-tagging, but I am really most interested in how tagging people can help in product development (and overall in product innovation).

Tag – You are It!

Most people that use social networks are getting used to tagging, particularly those that use Twitter. In Facebook, people are used to seeing tagging on uploaded photos. So what is tagging? Tagging (for our purposes here) is just associated a person with content. There are other forms of tagging as well, such as the “#” tagging or “hashcodes” in Twitter than help associate content with events or topics, keyword tagging, etc. But what I am talking about is simply including an individual’s identification along with the content. But I am not talking about their name, I am talking about tagging their online presence. Tagging isn’t just letting people know who is involved. The power of people tagging comes when associating the person to the context allows the tag to be followed to see or learn more about the person tagged.

Quick Example

OK, you are reading a blog on social networking so you probably already know this, but just in case I will provide a quick personal example:

I attended a conference, and one of the people I follow on Twitter mentioned that they were going to the bar with two other individuals. Not that interesting, right? Except that they were at the same conference that I was and my contact tagged the two people by including their “@” codes, or their Twitter identities. That meant that anybody that followed any of the three would now know they were getting together for a drink. So what? I recognized one of the names as somebody I wanted to meet. The second name I didn’t recognize, but I followed the link to the profile and found out it was another blogger that I would like to meet. In short, my network expanded by two new people that day because one friend tagged the other two. And, I got a free drink out of it too.

Can We Get Back to Product Development Please?

Thanks for your patience with the aside, I try not to assume everybody knows about things like tagging. So how does this apply to product development? Let’s take a quick example of status reports. If a status report mentions that @Engineer is working on a problem, I might read that status report and have something to offer. I could instantly click and connect with the tagged person (hopefully with some security settings in place) and offer my advice. Or, perhaps it is a year later and I am facing that same problem. I might search on the issue and find this old status report. Then, I see that @Engineer faced this problem a year ago. I could follow the link and find additional content related to the tagged individual that might help me with my problem, or connect to ask for advice.

Implications for Manufacturers

It’s Monday, I will keep this short. Tagging is a very important part of social computing, and highly applicable to PLM because product development is fundamentally a people-driven process. This is just one more reason that social computing in PLM makes so much sense to me.

Thinking of tagging in product development also ties strongly into past discussions such as Oleg’s PLM, don’t fight processes – focus on people! and other related discussions in the PLM community of late. It is also very important when considering the importance of social discovery and how social computing drives innovation.

So I believe tagging people in social computing will be helpful to product developers, I hope you found it interesting. Who knew? I didn’t, if you did let us know about it.

What I learned this week…is that it is really fun to pick on Facebook because it doesn’t have the capabilities to support product innovation, product development, and engineering. Of course, it was never intended to and that is probably not a market that they are really very interested in. But it is fun, and also helps to bring home some of the requirements that are important for social computing in PLM. This post started as a reply to Stan’s comment on my not building an airplane on Facebook post, and I realized after about 17 pages of comments that maybe I had better turn it into a blog post. Thank you Stan for bringing up a lot of very good questions.

Some Good Questions

Stan brought up a lot of good questions. Some I have thoughts for, others are just good questions that will require the thoughtful development of a solution – one that works in the real, complicated world of product innovation, product development, and engineering (and yes, just to take one more shot at it, that is not Facebook). I have pulled out what I consider some core questions from the comment and offered my thoughts below (hopefully well paraphrased):

How do we have Time to Pay Attention to This (in addition to everything else)?

People will make time for what is valuable. If people can get the information they need faster through social computing capabilities, then it will pay for itself. If we can eliminate 90% of status e-mails (and their redundant replies) then we will save time overall. Or, if we gain access to technical, market, or customer insight that we didn’t have access to before, the value will come in more profitable products. Social computing should be replacing innefficient communications and processes with more efficient and/or more effective ones. If not, it is just a sinkhole for time. As much fun as it might be to share Dilbert cartoons with coworkers, social computing in PLM must focus on enhancing communication and collaboration in a business context.

What Good is Sharing Status Updates (like Facebook)?

I believe status, even like Twitter or Facebook, can offer business value. But it has to be status in a business context - not a social context. For example, there is little business value in me knowing that you are visiting your son for the holidays. But if we are coworkers and I know you are visiting one of our key suppliers next week, I might be able to leverage your visit to accomplish some of my goals with that company as well. Or if we are on a project together and you say “I am redesigning the left widget today,” I might really like to know that because I am working on the right widget, and we may be making incompatible decisions. Considering the distance between team members these days (globalization, outsourcing, etc.) I probably won’t hear about this at the water cooler or over the cube wall, but maybe on a “social” network we are both on for our project. This is where a company today could use an internal tool like Yammer or maybe even SharePoint.

What Good is Sharing Photos (like Facebook)?

I think the commenter may have been baiting me with this one. Sharing product information visually can go a long way. Whether it’s a 3D representation of my widget (with rotation, sectioning, measurement, explosion, etc.) or something simple like sharing a photo of some sketched artwork for the packaging, the old adage that “a picture is worth a thousdand words” rings very true in product development – particularly product development across language and cultural boundaries. Even Facebook photos (or Twitpics) could help here.

What about Security and Protecting IP?

Now, we start getting to some hard questions. If we believe that some of the things above are useful, we probably also believe that we only want to share the information with the right people. On Facebook, it might just be our competitors as easily as it is our coworkers. Or on Twitter, we are just posting into the public timeline (viewable by all, unless you protect your updates which makes it much less useful overall). Today’s social networkings are just not built to handle the kind of robust data access needs that you would find in a product development/engineering environment. What about auditability? Revision control? Regulations like ITAR? Nope, not yet – and probably not ever for a “social” social computing tool as opposed to a “business-oriented” social computing tool, or even a “PLM-oriented” social computing tool (through development or extension of an existing platform).

So that is what I learned this week, I hope you found it interesting. Thanks to Stan for his thought-provoking questions, and thanks to Facebook for being such an easy target. I doubt their product managers are reading this, but if you are please know that I realize you never intended to support these kinds of requirements. Well, except for stability, and I know you will get that right eventually. Let me know what you think.

What I learned this week … came from a participant at my session on Social Computing in PLM at COFES last month. A quote from the session has been haunting me since that time, and I haven’t been able to place my finger on why it has resonated in my head. I think because it is both meaningful to me and meaningless at the same time. The quote was “We are not going to desgin an airplane on Facebook!” The statement drew a lot of chuckles, and I have to believe it’s a true statement of fact. But I think why it haunts me is that people are willing to discount the value of a hugely important trend (the use of social computing technologies in business) because the examples they have don’t quite fit the way the currently work.

Background
See my previous post for some background (and relevant links) about social computing in PLM. I believe this is one of the most important opportunities to improve product innovation, product development, and engineering performance that will unfold over the next 2-5 years. Without repeating all of that here, let’s drill into why the statement is meaningful and meaningless:

Why You Probably Will Use Social Computing in Product Development
To me, there is a simple fact about developing products that transcends industries, time, and corporate cultures. It is hard to get people to work together effectively. It takes a lot of different skills (technical, marketing, financial, etc.) to bring a profitable product to market. And beneath those classifications, there are more sub-skills. In the technical domain there are designers, engineers, validation/analysis people, compliance experts, manufacturing resources and quality personnel. Down another level inside engineering, many products require mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, and software engineers. You get the point – there are a lot of skills (and therefor people) involved. This is true for even simple products, let alone an airplane. If the fundamental truth is that it is hard to keep all of these people informed and working together – and you believe there is value in improving it - how can social computing in PLM be anything but inevitable?

Just talking about the collaboration aspects of social computing leads me to a clear vision of how the daily communication and information sharing can be sped up and made more effective with capabilities like threaded discussion or instant messaging. I can easily envision using a blog to capture the thought processes and discussion for a major decision where multiple people need to weigh in, but also provide that context of the decision for downstream decision-making and learning. I see the potential to reduce e-mail and inefficient meetings in favor of more streamlined, rapid (yet documented) communication. And this doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface on the ability to work with a broader network of talented individuals or tap into communities such as pools of experts or customers. These are practical ways to improve product development that can return faster time to market, better product decision-making, earlier design validation (less rework), reduced cost, improved efficiency, and more.

Why You Won’t Design a Plane on Facebook
With all of this said, not designing a plane on Facebook suddenly sounds like a meaningless, misguided statement. Between collaboration and discovery, the value is available. I can conclude that this is a case of somebody looking at a solution (Facebook) and not being able to abstract the underlying capabilities (social networking) to apply to their own business. This isn’t uncommon, it is hard for a lot of people to look beyond the current implementation of a technology. On the other hand, we are talking about really smart, experienced engineers here, not a part time clerk with little training or visibility to the “big picture.”

So as much as I want to dismiss the comment, I can’t shake it.Why? He is right, at least for him, and at least now. Why? There is work to be done and questions to be answered before just dropping the technology in place. Here are a series of questions / objections that he could point out that make Facebook inadequate:

• How do I have time to pay attention to this in addition to everything I already do?
• How do we address security concerns?
• What relevance do status comments and photos have to do with serious engineering?
• How will we protect intellectual properly?
• What does Facebook know about business processes or how to manage them?
• What does Facebook know about engineering data? CAD files? Projects? Engineering in general?
• Why would I trust my business performance to a technology platform like Facebook that doesn’t appear stable or perform well (sorry Facebook, that is just my practical experience not a sound technical analysis)?

These questions are valid, and just a sample of what companies are asking. This is what makes Facebook (as an application, as it stands today) meaningless to developing an airplane. The big question is whether answering these questions and solving the technical (and business) challenges will provide new business value. Are the obstacles to be climbed (or blown up to clear a better path) worth the value of arriving at the destination? And if it’s not Facebook (I agree it’s not), then what will be the path to enable product development with social computing capabilities?

Implications for Manufacturers?
I want to end with a “yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” type of feel-good statement. But I am not that kind of analyst, and the answer isn’t that simple. But here it goes: “Yes, Global Manufacturer, you will design an airplane using social computing capabilities.” There goes my Pulitzer Prize, it just doesn’t have a ring to it. But on the other hand, it will be a statement that I will be comfortable to live with and review over the next few years to see if we (as a manufacturing community) are making progress in this direction. My bet is that - while not eloquent - my statement will ring true for some time.

So that is what I learned this week, I hope you found it interesting. I am probably writing about this just so the quote stops bouncing around in my head, thanks for indulging me. Let me know what you think.

NOTE: I updated the quote and post title from “… build an airplane …” to “… design an airplane… ” which captures the spirit of the conversation, and on reflection is probably better captures the actual quote.