Clarity on PLM

I had the chance to talk with … SAP and their customer Colgate in June, and learned that they have been hard at work improving the way manufacturers innovate. I was attending an SAP customer event on PLM to get updated on the progress of SAP’s PLM efforts. SAP continued to showcase their new PLM interfaces (now including Recipe Management for the process industries). But the thing that caught my attention most was a presentation on a newly co-developed solution for product innovation codenamed “Edison.” While this isn’t a formal SAP product as of yet, it shows some real promise on how companies can use social computing to drive innovation.

Note: Hopefully this wasn’t the only thing I learned in June, but things have certainly busy and I am behind in sharing!

What they are Doing

The solution, presented jointly by SAP and Colgate, is labeled as an “idea management” solution. To me that description falls a bit short of what they have developed. The solution handles a broad range of the innovation process, including:

• Idea Solicitation – to help target innovation as opposed to an all purpose suggestion box
• Idea Submission – to capture ideas from participants, including any supporting media they choose to submit
• Review and Processing – to help companies find the ideas they want to focus on, including search, filtering, sorting, tagging, and commenting
• Evaluation – allowing companies to score innovation and promote the good ones
• Execution – although this was a little less clear to me, this is the idea that the promoted ideas would flow into SAP’s PPM solution to turn into product development projects

The first thing that stood out to me as evidence that this was based on practical experience was that they didn’t assume that getting more ideas was better. I run into vendors all the time who like to talk about helping their manufacturing customers get more ideas. All of my research and interviews end up with the same conclusion from manufacturers: “I don’t need more ideas, I need help sorting through all of the junk to find the good ones!” Manufacturers want better ideas, and they want a way to make sense of the volumes of input they get. Kudos to Colgate and SAP for getting this right, which I have to imagine came from Colgate’s real-world experience in innovation.

Another thing I was impressed with was the objectives of the project. They set out to build something “simple, usable, flexible, and extendable.” As well thought out as the solution seems, it doesn’t appear that they over-designed it. The solution does not look or feel like SAP, but instead is a light, web-based experience. While this might not be appropriate for the highly transactional world of traditional SAP solutions, it is ideal for this application where broad use by untrained participants is a key to success. After all, you don’t want all of your innovation coming from a few trained insiders!

One final point that Colgate made which I think is important to consider, is that the solution is not only valuable in the front end of innovation but throughout the new product development process. In fact, early use of the tool at Colgate has helped solve supply chain issues like cost reduction.

Implications for Manufacturers

The use of social computing techniques to drive innovation is beginning to take shape. SAP is clearly interested in providing this capability, as are standalone innovation management solutions such as Brightidea, Imaginatik, Ideajam, and others.  Some upcoming research I will publish soon with Kalypso shows that many manufacturers are getting started in the use of social media in innovation, and those that did are going to increase usage next year. Times are changing, and it will be interesting to see who can best take advantage of this new opportunity.

So that is what I heard from SAP and Colgate, I hope you found it interesting. Who knew? I didn’t, if you did let us know about it. Who else should I be paying attention to in this space?

I had the chance to talk with … PTC and their customers at last week’s PTCuser user conference. PTC has been busy, making a number of significant announcements. I will clearly not do justice to such a big event in one short blog, but I hope to hit the highlights for you and share my thoughts on the implications.

Note: Just to be clear, this is the last PTCuser because the conference is changing and will be renamed PlanetPTC.

What I Learned

PTC is still serious about mechanical CAD. They believe that there is still innovation happening in that space, and that it will be an interesting market in the future. Good news for mechanical engineers and those that are fans of PTC CAD solutions including Pro/Engineer and CoCreate. They announced Project Lightening which is a multi-year strategy to reinvent mechanical CAD, but promised deliverables in the near term. Not much information here yet, but from conversations with PTC product managers this is a big focus area. Expect some significant focus on making MCAD much easier to use.

PTC is pushing the PLM boundaries. PTC furthered InSight product analytics by announcing product cost analytics and expanded Arbortext into service documentation and instructions. By going into areas like product analytics (particularly in areas like cost), PTC continues to push the envelope. PTC has a broad vision for PLM, and has already stretched the scope of PLM to include product documentation and engineering calculations in the past, and they don’t appear to be done yet.

PTC is making good on their Social Product Development initiative. The new SocialLink product is a great example of this. They added a new product, but also demonstrated how these new social computing capabilities will work across the entire PTC product portfolio. That is the right way to do it (in my opinion). The capabilities are generalized and part of the infrastructure (in large part thanks to Microsoft), but the application of the capabilities is happening in the solutions themselves. This allows product managers from each product line to decide how their users can benefit. Expect more here over time.

PTC has refocused on a Small to Midsize Business (SMB) PDM system – ProductPoint is no longer trying to be both a simpler PDM offering for the SMB and PTC’s answer to Social Product Development. With the introduction of SocialLink and other social computing capabilities, ProductPoint is now free to be a SharePoint-based PDM system. Good news for the SMB who doesn’t need (or can’t attain) a full PLM system.

PTC enters PPM market – PTC is launching a product portfolio management solution based on Microsoft technology. The early indications are that PTC’s solution is more focused on project roll ups and programs than decision support in product portfolios and R&D investment. Stay tuned for more on this in the future as I learn more.

PlanetPTC replaces PTCuser – PTC users have asked PTC to take a broader role and responsibility in the user event. PlanetPTC also includes a community site and virtual events like webcasts, showing that PTC really believes in the power of social media.

So that’s what I hear from PTC, I am sure I missed something. I hope you found it useful. What do you think? What else should I have asked them? What else would you like them to do?

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.

What I learned this week … came from a great post on Hypertextual titled Positioning with other IT systems: the liquid nature of Enterprise 2.0. I really enjoyed reading the post, and some of the underlying information linked to it including How Enterprise 2.0 fosters Knowledge Capture. There are some very powerful thoughts here. I think the post does a fantastic job of discussing the value that social computing has to offer PLM (and other applications such as ERP, SCM, and CRM). I see things slightly differently regarding social computing and PLM, but I believe it is in a complementary not a conflicting way. I will respond to the post directly, but I felt I had more to say than I could fit into a comment so decided to share here.

Enterprise Applications Roles

To summarize a few key background points from the post (please read the post, it is worth your time and I will not do it full justice here):

• Referencing Michael Grieves’ book Product Lifecycle Management, Driving the Next Generation of Lean Thinking, the author (Cecil Dijoux) points out that the interconnecting nature of ERP, PLM, SCM, and CRM in relation to domain knowledge and business activities. The model here shows ERP overlapping in certain activities and domains. I couldn’t agree more.
• Later he states that ERP, PLM, SCM, and CRM systems “have very clear boundaries and a strict scope of responsibilities.” That is a good model to work from, although I believe that there are overlapping “grey areas” where roles need to be defined on a company basis. See The Evolving Roles of ERP and PLM in Manufacturing for more of my thoughts there, including how PLM develops plans for manufacturing and quality that are executed in ERP. Oleg has also been posting some very interesting points on ERP and PLM in PLM Twine.

Social Software and Enterprise Applications

More importantly, the Cecil goes further to point out two areas where traditional enterprise applications fall short, and social computing software (what he refers to as ”Emergent Social Software Platforms” or “ESSP”) “fill the gap”: 

• Tacit Knowledge – This is information that is corporate knowledge, and frequently poorly captured. I love the way Cecil describes the issue; “Some studies show that between 25 and 50% of the communication between knowledge workers remains tacit and uncaptured. The question is how can we be productive and comfortable with our daily work if about half of the raw material we’re working with is wandering around ?.“ Knowledge management is a tremendous issue in product innovation, product development, and engineering. In the underlying post on Enterprise 2.0, Cecil says “It is easier and less intimidating for knowledge workers to capture knowledge on collaborative platforms (wiki, blogs, forums etc …)  then on word documents and then knowledge management systems.“
• Communities – Product development is about people, or as I have been known to say “product innovation is a team sport.” Again, I love what Cecil has to say. “ESSP make it easy to build communities which, in the enterprise context, are built around common areas of knowledge, business expertise, and professional know-how. These communities juxtapose different types of experts (technical, marketing, sale, integration) on a specific domain. This allows to build multi-dimensional expertise in very confined and otherwise unreachable locations in the company activity and knowledge map.”

I can’t agree more with what Cecil says about how social computing helps capture tacit knowledge and develop communities. I went back to check, I said almost the exact same things in Going Social with Product Development, although in a different way. What I said is that there are three areas where social computing will help PLM specifically:

• Enhance product development team execution and collaboration
• More naturally capture and share product knowledge and expertise
• Enable the discovery of new IP and product value

I think the alignment with the second point and Cecil’s point on tacit knowledge is clear. My thoughts on communities are represented in both improving collaboration within existing teams, but also discovering new product value through “social discovery.” Please see more detail in the report Tech-Clarity Insight: Going Social with Product Development: Improving Product Development Performance with Social Computing.

My Complementary View

So where do I see things differently? Cecil talks about social computing filling gaps in the enterprise system landscape. In his words, “This provides a liquid nature to ESSPs that helps them to seep in and fill up any gaps left by other systems.” I see this very differently. Maybe it is my old scars from the days when enterprise workflow was going to do the same thing. Instead, I see social computing as a new part of the infrastructure that helps connect and extend applications like PLM into a community. The social software is important, but the product lifecycle management domain expertise is crucial.

What is the key difference in views? Integration. I believe that social software is a part of the answer. But social computing needs to be addressed in the context of PLM. See How Will PLM Get Social? for more of my insight. How will PLM capture knowledge and make it useful unless it is tied back to the underlying product record? It will help, but it will miss the mark. To me, the value in social computing is not as a gap filler. Yes, it fills the gaps of capturing tacit knowledge and developing communities. But instead I see it is a new way to connect and extend PLM to capture and discover knowledge in the context of the product. It is also a way to improve collaboration in the product development community. Perhaps Cecil will agree, we may just be looking at different aspects of the same topic.

Implications for Manufacturers

If you have read this far, you clearly have an interest in the intersection of social computing and PLM. I have only one piece of advise. Keep learning. This is going to have a big impact on how companies innovate and bring products to market, and the manufacturers that are experimenting with social computing techniques in PLM and developing corporate understanding will have a big advantage in the future. We don’t know what that future will look like, but I can tell you it will be different and you don’t want to be caught left behind. On this point, I believe Cecil would probably echo my thoughts. And if you haven’t read his posts yet, go back and learn from them. There is a lot you can take away from his posts.

So that is what I learned from Cecil on Hypertextual (Merci Cecil!) along with some of my perspective. I hope you found it interesting. Let us know what you think.

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.

What I learned this week … came from a blog post  in the PTC Social Product Development blog. The post, How will PLM get Social, was written by … me. OK, perhaps this is cheating a bit, but PTC asked me to write a guest blog post and I liked it so I decided to share it here as well. The question I think this posts answers is “if social computing in PLM is going to provide value, how will the PLM industry get there?”

The Potetential of PLM and Social Computing

I have posted a number of time (see Going Social with Product Development as an example) that I believe there is significant business value to be gained from the intersection of social computing in PLM. Why? Because product development is inherently a team activity. Getting a product right requires contributions and feedback from people from all corporate walks of life. The most brilliant technical product that doesn’t fit a market need is wasted technical beauty. The fantastic market breakthrough that can’t be manufactured effectively is at best a squandered market, and at worst an opening for a competitor to introduce the leading product in a market that you created. The blockbuster product that can’t be introduced into new geographies is a lost opportunity. OK, ok, you get the picture and I know I am preaching to the choir. There is gold in the hills of social computing in PLM, even if it’s just inside the enterprise. And if the opportunity for innovation internally is high, extending outside is potentially greater.

So if we agree, the question becomes “how do we get there as an industry?” Here are my thoughts:

Figuring it Out

I believe that manufacturers need to experiment and learn to see what works. This is an area for process innovation, not an area where standard best practices apply. This is uncharted territory, and requires exploration. Multiple pilot projects, sharing ideas with other companies, and a willingness to fail are important factors to success. It will take a while to get this right, but those that get there first will not only have the advantage of their success. They will also have the advantage of the knowledge and experience they develop through the process.

Building It Out

Most of the early efforts will require custom work. As of today, there are no standard, off-the-shelf applications that provide everything a company needs on a “plug and play” basis. There are lots of components available, but they need to be assembled and integrated to meet needs as they are defined. Without proven best practices, it is hard to expect a standard solution! Having said that, some PLM vendors are helping blaze the trail. They are investing in helping manufacturers “figure it out” based on their own understanding of product development and building social capabilities directly into their products. (Note that by the fact that PTC asked me to contribute to their blog on this topic, you can safely assume that they are taking social computing in PLM seriously.) These built-in enablers are a big boost to manufacturers in helping enable their programs as they learn and experiment to determine where the specific business value is for their particular company.

Institutionalizing It

As the manufacturing industry becomes more experienced, best practices will emerge. At that point, PLM vendors will have a business process “template” to build from in the same way they had when building applications for configuration management or concurrent design. At this point, the infrastructure vendors (such as Microsoft) will have many of the core capabilities available in their technology stack. Those common components can then be assembled, tailored, and integrated into existing PLM business processes to create socially-enabled PLM. The key in institutionalizing these capabilities is to combine the generic social capabilities with the knowledge of product development, and then integrate the general capabilities into solutions that handle the specific needs of engineers and product developers (such as protecting intellectual property, linking to product configurations, etc.)

Implications for Manufacturers

So what does this mean to today’s manufacturer? First, get started. It’s challenging to start on a journey when you don’t know the final destination. That is something that is being discovered along the way, and you can change course as you go. Start with small investments and short programs that contribute to corporate learning. Second, partner with your PLM vendor. Share your emerging best practices with them so they can help drive their product strategy. Some are investing today, others will follow suit. Be a part of the build-out. Finally, take advantage of the institutionalized, standard solutions as they become available. Share in the investment that your PLM vendor has made and implement best practices. But don’t wait for them to emerge, help create them. One company’s best practice isn’t always as advantageous to another. Focus today’s efforts on unique value that helps your company achieve its business strategy.

So those are my thoughts from the PTC blog reconstructed here, I hope you found it interesting. There is more that could be said, but I will leave it at that for now and I look forward to your feedback. I also invite you to read more of my thoughts on social computing in PLM on the ClarityonPLM blog by clicking the “social computing” tag in the tag link.

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.

A quick peek into some research on … the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technologies. The report, The State of Enterprise Adoption Q4 2009, is an interesting read from the “2.0 Adoption Council.” The analysis is brief, but the insights are strong and the authors promise more detail in the future. My first introduction to the research came from a blog post on ReadWrite Enterprise titled Enterprise 2.0: Study Shows Adoption is Real with a strong statement that “Manufacturing Has Surprising High Adoption.”

State of Enterprise 2.0 Adoption

I would suggest reading the underlying research, because (as you will see below) I have a different interpretation of the results. But with my high level of interest in Social Computing in Product Development and PLM I do see some positive signs from the study. Thanks to Oleg for his Enterprise 2.0 Adoption and Social PLM post which pointed me to a blog (and then subsequently to the underlying research). I have a slightly different take on the implications of the findings, but that may be because research is frequently left open for some level of interpretation. Regardless, we both agree that things are moving in a positive direction in regards to PLM and social computing.

The Research Findings

As always, I encourage you to read the study. The report clearly shows that participants are adopting “Enterprise 2.0.” The report itself does not provide a definition of Enterprise 2.0, but because the participants were pre-qualified I assume they have a good understanding. For the rest of us, here is a definition we can use that I took from Wikepedia:

Enterprise social software (also known as or regarded as a major component of Enterprise 2.0), comprises social software as used in “enterprise” (business/commercial) contexts. It includes social and networked modifications to corporate intranets and other classic software platforms used by large companies to organize their communication.

The report shows that the majority of survey participants still see Enterprise 2.0 in the stages of early adoption. But in their own companies, there are typically multiple projects going on. This to me indicates that there will clearly be leaders and laggards in the adoption of social computing techniques in the enterprise. This is where companies will be able to differentiate themselves and gain advantage over their competition.

Manufacturing is well represented in the survey respondents, but I wouldn’t read too much into that. The industry chart just shows the participants in the research, and the fact that 15 companies out of 77 that took the survey describe themselves as “high tech” and 7 describe themselves as “manufacturing” doesn’t really point to a larger trend that manufacturing is leading in social computing. What I do find interesting is the anecdotal comments in the report that “It is heartening to see that a drive to improve collaboration has taken hold in an industry (manufacturing) which is notoriously difficult to change rapidly” and “… our manufacturing members express the most frustration with introducing change.” This clearly reflects the conversations I have been having with manufacturers.

Implications for Manufacturers

So what does this mean for manufacturers? As much as I would love to jump to the conclusion that social computing is booming, I interpret this differently. I see this as:

• Manufacturers are very interested in social computing
• The early adopters are hard at work figuring it out
• Progress has been cautious (for the most part)

My beliefs on how manufacturers will adopt social computing in product development has not changed:

• Most manufacturers will start with the low-hanging fruit of improving collaboration, and most will start internally
• Manufacturers will be more likely to adopt social computing techniques when they are incorporated into applications they trust such as PLM, which will protect their intellectual property (IP)
• There will be significant value gained by those manufacturers that adopt social computing to improve product innovation, product development, and engineering performance

This study offers some good validation that some thought-leading manufacturers are moving towards Enterprise 2.0. I wouldn’t read too much into it in regards to a general trend, but there is clearly something going on that manufacturers need to learn about and start experimenting with.

So that was a quick peek into some recent research on the adoption of Enterprise 2.0, 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 more free research and white papers from Tech-Clarity.

What I learned this week… came from a Twitter message responding to my blog. I thought that seemed appriorate given that we were discussing social computing and social networking. The message was in response to a post the other day about Going Social with Product Development, pointing me to the embedded video. The post discussed the use of social computing techniques in product innovation, product development, and engineering. 

Note: Thanks to 3DPerspectives for passing this along

The Video

This video is a very straight-forward explanation, using simple terms and a practical example. Well done.

Implications for Manufacturers

I focused more on the internal uses in my research, because I feel those will be the first capabilities adopted. What I liked is that this video really focuses more on innovation in external communities. While I think this kind of example involves more thinking in regards to where the business value lies as compared to collaboration within the corporate social network, I also think the potential for developing a unique and compelling business model is higher and may offer higher returns. I think it’s good for manufacturers to start adopting social computing in their current PLM environment, while exploring the benefits of leveraging external communities for greater innovation.

So just a short and sweet link to the video with some of my thoughts, I hope you found it interesting.

A quick peek into some research on … how manufacturers are taking advantage of social computing and “Web 2.0″ technologies to raise the bar on product development performance in my new report Tech-Clarity Insight: Going Social with Product Development: Improving Product Development Performance with Social Computing. The paper discusses the intersection of social computing and new product development (NPD) processes and tools. I have posted frequently about the intersection of social computing and PLM and product innovation, and this research provides some examples on how these strategies are starting to play out for manufacturers like Microsoft (think PC hardware and game consoles, not Windows) and Pitney Bowes.
The Research Findings

The paper discusses uses of social computing from the basics of collaboration to the adoption of more innovative business models. Most companies will start with more conservative extensions to existing processes like design collaboration. In these cases, incorporating tools like instant messaging into the product development workflow can help streamline interactions. Capabilities like presence detection and interactive file sharing help make existing collaborative processes better. For many companies, these capabilities are readily available and require little change to underlying business processes.

Other forms of communication, such as blogs and wikis, offer a combination of better communication and knowledge management. These online discussion tools change the product dialogue from a one-way push of information to a two-way, interactive, dynamic, electronic conversation to help people better share information and ideas. Beyond better communication, the simple fact that the conversations are happening centrally and in electronic format turns product-related discussions and decision-making into a searchable knowledge asset.

Social computing can also be used to extend collaboration and information sharing to broader communities. This allows product developers to collaborate with the people they know, but also extend their search to find others in the corporate network that have valuable knowledge and expertise that previously would have gone untapped. By connecting people around product and project context, companies enable “social discovery” which fundamentally changes the available talent and expertise available to a project.

Beyond the corporate community, companies can also develop new product intellectual property (IP) from social computing. By extending the online community to customers and the market, new opportunities to gather “voice of the customer” and test ideas emerge. While these concepts require more change to the business and the way it operates, they also offer an even greater potential return by leveraging larger communities.

Implications for Manufacturers
The implications break down into two categories. The first implications are about the applicability and importance of social computing in product development. You have probably heard me talk about this before, and this report helps confirm and expand my thoughts on the subject. There is clearly something of value happening with the intersection of this exciting and popular new way of communicating and the business of developing profitable products.

The second set of implications fall into the category of practical advice and lessons learned to take advantage of this new opportunity. The opportunities are available, but the most important thing is that manufacturers don’t discount the applicability of social computing concepts based on their personal experience with Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, or any other social networking sites. Manufacturers have to see through the use of these communication techniques for “fun” and see the significant business potential. This potential will likely never come from the public social networking sites, but instead by incorporating these “Web 2.0″ concepts into existing infrastructure and product development solutions. This is the most practical method to both achieve the value, but also ensure that product data and intellectual property (IP) is protected and that the solutions are used in the right context – to improve products and projects that drive corporate profitability.

So that was a quick peek into some recent research on social computing in product development, 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 more free research and white papers about PLM and other enterprise software for manufacturers from Tech-Clarity