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 post on PLM Think Tank (aka PLM Twine) titled 5 reasons why Wiki fails for PLM collaboration which I think points to an interesting set of questions:

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• Is social computing software enough on its own to support product innovation, product development, and engineering?
• Will social computing software evolve to handle more full PLM-related requirements as it matures?
• Will PLM leverage social computing platforms to extend their capabilities?
• Will PLM embed social computing capabilities of their own?

This post caught my eye a while ago, but I didn’t have time to respond (lots of excuses, including moving the office, I got the flu, kids got the flu, the dog ate my blog, etc.). As it turns out, time passing works out well because I have had the opportunity to read some really interesting comments on Oleg’s post. Here is my take on an interesting conversation, and some of my thoughts on the direction that social computing in PLM might take.

Note: In the title of this post I purposely not using my normal name for this concept, which is “social computing in PLM” because I think that begs the question. So I am using what I believe will be the term adopted across the industry, which is “Social Product Development.”

Relevant Past Discussion and Perspective
I have posted a number of times recently on the use of social computing techniques to improve product innovation, product development, and engineering performance. For some background, please see my post on takeaways from COFES on social networking in PLM.

Next Level Down Thinking – Technical Approach
What I have been focused on has been the business value of integrating social computing capabilities into PLM solutions. Although I have a long technical background (anybody else out there that has programmed in Fortran let me hear from you) that is not my current role in our industry. I am convinced of the business value that the mix of capabilities will bring, but I am not close enough to the technologies to know how they will be brought to life in individual companies or in the mass market. So it was nice to see some next-level-down, technical analysis of the topic. Oleg’s post drives the question about wikis relatively deep, pointing out the five reasons he sees them falling short (read the post, but in short they are information access, content maintenance, updates, integration, and structural information). At the risk of trivializing something I haven’t explored in detail, I take away two main things from Oleg’s comments:

• A wiki isn’t PLM grade because it falls short on advanced data management needs (including version control, associativity, or managing structured content like a bill of material)
• A wiki isn’t PLM grade because it lacks the ability to integrate (beyond a static URL)

The conversation that follows is enlightening, I was very impressed with the quality of the respondents. I take two main points away from the conversation (again, I suggest you spend the time reading it yourself, my goal is to expand a bit and point you to some good content that I learned from):

• Don’t count wikis short, there is work being done to make them enterprise class
• Don’t try to replace your PLM system with a wiki, they are not meant to replicate what PLM has evolved into over the last decade or so

Implications for Manufacturers?
Of the two things I am taking away from the post and the comments, I want to focus on the last one – don’t try to replace you PLM system with a wiki. My focus on using social computing techniques in PLM isn’t to slap on existing tools and expect them to do the full job. That would be like handing somebody a relational database and an object-oriented programming language and saying “here is your PLM system, it just needs a bit of work.” OK, too extreme, but you get my point. What we should be focusing on as an industry is how to leverage the concepts of social computing to improve the things that PLM already supports, but make them even better. Perhaps we employ wikis to manage engineering rules/knowledge (PLM doesn’t do a great job there from my experience), or maybe the value will come from using social communities and reputation scoring to feed the front end of innovation? Whatever it may be, I believe that there are things that PLM alone doesn’t address, and there are certainly PLM needs that social computing platforms fall very short on.

So that brings back my original question. Who will make this happen? Will it be natural the evolution of social networking platforms? Will it be custom development by manufacturers that use both technologies? Will PLM integrate social computing platforms? Or will PLM vendors build their own social computing capabilities? The answer lies in the “next level down” thinking that prompted this post, and similar thinking that is going on in the software vendor community. In my opinion, domain expertise always overrides technology expertise. When new technologies have come along, it has been people that understand the intersection of technology with the business processes (in this case, the processes of product innovation, product development, and engineering) that lead the way. They are also the ones that are willing to focus on a specific solution as opposed to a generalized technology that could be applied to a broader market. To me, it will be PLM-knowledgeable people leading the way. The bigger question is where they will be working. Will they work for a forward-thinking PLM vendor that builds these capabilities in? A social computing giant that hires in experienced PLM talent? Or some upstart with a PLM background that rethinks the whole thing from the ground up? If I had the answer I would be a (retired, wealthy) investor instead of an analyst, sorry. What I am confident in is that the business value is real, and that if I was in the shoes of any of those categories of vendors that is where I would be putting my investment. But I am only an analyst, so I will sit by and examine how it plays out. It’s tough to be on the sidelines (or is the press box?) for this one.

So that is what I learned this week, I hope you found it interesting. Let me know what you think. I apologize if I tried to make up for the tardiness of replying to the post by writing a very long post, I probably had to much time to think about it.