Clarity on PLM

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

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 an article in The New York Times by Alex Wright. The article, Mining the Web for Feelings not Facts, was a great look into a concept that is new to me, an emerging field called “sentiment analysis.” The article defines sentiment analysis as “translating the vagaries of human emotion into hard data.” The examples show companies using data analysis techniques to gain insight into what social media (such as social networks and blogs) are saying about their company. My thoughts immediately turned to the value this information would have to product developers to understand how customers feel about their products, and what a great tool this could be in the social computing toolkit for PLM.

Sentiment Analysis

I won’t repeat all of the fascinating things the article says, and instead recommend you take a few minutes to read it. It is very interesting, and an exciting new concept. Here are some of the key points from my perspective:

• Sentiment analysis opens a “window into the collective consciousness of Internet users”
• Opinions are a kind of “virtual currency“
• Social media offers a “rich vein of market intelligence“

The article points out that this is a new, imperfect science and mentions some interesting pioneers of the concept. It also introduces a new book which is on my “to read” list titled Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis by Bo Pang and Lillian Lee.

My Thoughts  – Sentiment Analysis in PLM

So how can this social computing approach be used to develop more profitable products? If we can gather feedback on products, product ideas and competitive offerings rapidly it gives us the opportunity to react early to – or ahead of -  a trend. Many manufacturers are starting to monitor social networking sites like Twitter to see what people are saying, but for the most part it is manual except for filtering on keywords. Currently, the review and analysis depends on people. This is not a sustainable approach for product managers and product marketers to sift through mountains of comments, at least in my opinion. But if social computing techniques can detect and alert them to potential changes in market opinion that they should pay attention to, that could provide the input needed to help steer product development (or at least product marketing, if changing the product quickly is not an option).

Product managers are already overwhelmed with input, and the Internet is creating even more every day. The information is valuable, but takes time to review and interpret. If computing algorithms can help decipher and summarize, then product developers can focus on the important trends as opposed to sifting through the haystack to find them.

Implications for Manufacturers

This is just one more example of how companies are trying to leverage social computing to improve their product innovation, product development, and engineering performance. There is clearly something going on here, something that offers significant advantages to the manufacturers that can figure it out and use social computing to their benefit. This example is part of what I call “social discovery,” which is a more advanced concept than more straight-forward uses of social computing in PLM such as enhancing collaboration. For more thoughts on social computing in PLM, you can click on the “social computing” tag on the ClarityonPLM site, or start with these thoughts on social product development and social computing in PLM.

So can we mine the web for emotions and use that market intelligence to drive product development? I think there is some real potential, among other opportunities that social computing and social networking are opening up. I hope you found it interesting. Who knew? I didn’t, if you did let us know about it.

Note: No, the picture has absolutely nothing to do with mining social networks, but I Googled “mind reading machines” and this is what came up. It made me smile, so I thought I would share it with you.

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.