Clarity on PLM

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 …came from a side conversation during some research I am working on in the innovation systems ecosystem. I was discussing the importance of different solutions in the space with this major electronic manufacturer, and he started to get very passionate when he turned the conversation to Web 2.0 and how it can improve innovation. With the work I have been doing on social computing in PLM, we ended up having a fascinating conversation about the potentials. It’s always nice when you see confirmation of a trend from an unexpected source.

My Thoughts on Connecting People to Improve Innovation

During our conversation, I kept coming back to a thought that I posted in one of my earlier discussions about the potential for social computing to revolutionalize PLM. I was trying to communicate the fact that social networking in PLM is more than just enhancing collaboration as we know it. I made the following observations:

• Collaboration – Working and sharing ideas with people you already know
• Social Networking in PLM – Discovering new people and ideas that can further your product innovation and engineering efforts
• In short, the difference is about discovery

I tried to make the point that “discovery” in product innovation, product development, and engineering was the new value that can be tapped into with social computing. Social computing techniques will also enhance existing collaboration techniques, but this is the really exciting stuff to me. How can we leverage our “social” business networks to tap into the vast amount of knowledge available to us?

His Thoughts on Connecting People to Improve Innovation

Without sharing any of my views, our conversation turned from the ability to search for product knowledge to the need to search for the people associated with the product knowledge. It was a totally unexpected shift in the conversation, because it is not directly in line with the particular research I was discussing with him. Of course that is what made the conversation so valuable. He told a story that was very similar to my past experience. One of the key values in finding engineering or innovation knowledge is to then find the people associated with it. In turn, the value may come from the discovery of the deliverables (designs, research, products, etc.) but also from collaborating with the creator of the deliverables. After all, there is knowledge in the deliverables. But there is probably even more knowledge available from the man or woman that created the knowledge!

So given recent conversations about putting the people in PLM, people centric PLM, and focusing on people vs. process in PLM in the PLM blogosphere, I thought it was great to see the intersection of PLM with social computing and innovation. Very exciting. I hope you found it interesting. Who knew? I didn’t, if you did let us know about it. And I look forward to sharing more of the conversation as that research makes its way to the public eye.

What I learned this week … came from two recent conversations with manufacturers about their use of social computing to support product innovation, product development, and engineering. I am exploring how companies are using these technologies to improve design and product development collaboration, but also trying to uncover ways they are going beyond collaboration on a specific product or design. Two of my recent conversations touched on the use of wikis and blogs to present information. To be more accurate, these manufacturers are using wikis and blogs to both collect and communicate engineering and product knowledge. Pretty interesting stuff, I think.

Overview

The two manufacturers I discussed were actually striving towards different goals. One company was developing product documentation in a wiki format. The idea is to allow actual users of the product to insert their perspectives into the manuals. The direction of the documentation was not free-form, but directed by a framework and outline provided centrally.  By allowing the network of individuals related to the product (including customers) to provide content, the company hopes to gain better, more hands-on product documentation with a lower investment. The documentation is not free by any means, but has the potential to be more rich in content. Note that this documentation approach would likely not be appropriate for many documentation needs, particularly where product safety and liability are concerns.

The second company is using wikis and blogs to provide internal standards and other information to engineers. Their goal is to allow selected experts to contribute their knowledge for others to access and utilize. They are providing a way for the experts in their company to share their expertise with others in an easy-to-access, more permanent format than word of mouth or written guidelines. The lower threshold of effort required to add information to a wiki, the ability to share their knowledge, and the opportunity to be seen as an expert should all motivate experienced individuals to contribute. In this company’s case, however, they are not leaving the development of their content up to the generosity of their employees. They are providing financial incentives to senior experts to motivate them to share knowledge.

Relevant Past Discussion and Perspective

This is particularly interesting to me based on a few past experiences. First, I have been focusing on the use of social computing in PLM for product development collaboration, and the use of social computing in PLM beyond collaboration. In addition, however, I did some research on how electronic engineering reference information helps drive improve engineering productivity.

Does Social Computing Yield Trusted Information?

The latter research really strikes home in relation to the importance of “trusted information.” The companies interviewed for that report were very clear in their need to not just access some information, but to access the right information – and information they could trust to be accurate.

How are these companies ensuring the information is accurate?

• Author’s Credibility - the first company is relying on the credibility of the person providing the information. First, they aren’t offering the ability to input information to anybody, only selected individuals. Second, they are making it clear who posted which piece of information so that the person consuming the information knows where it came from. In this case, it is a relatively small community so the reputation of each contributor is well known.

• Moderators’ Knowledge - the second company is also screening those that can participate, and limiting the input to a number of chosen “experts” in the field. Adding to this, they are appointing experienced moderators to review and validate submissions. In this way, the information has two levels of credibility – the credibility of a chosen author and the stamp of approval from an experienced moderator.

Implications for Manufacturers?

I see three primary takeaways for manufacturers:

1. Wikis and blogs offer a compelling way to capture and share engineering and product knowledge, both internally and externally
2. Those using wikis and blogs in this way need to have a strategy to validate information posted, and the individuals posting it
3. Manufacturers must clearly communicate the level of validation and integrity of each piece of information offered, or risk people making decisions on unsubstantiated data

While this is a compelling way to gather and share knowledge, it should not be applied blindly. Without providing an understanding of how the knowledge should be used (and how much it should be trusted) companies could find themselves making decisions much more rapidly – but on bad information. Using wikis and blogs can be a good strategy, but one that requires a well-conceived plan to address validity of information.

So that is what I learned this week, I hope you found it interesting. Let me know what you think.