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.
Product Development
Unlock My Product Data! Business Intelligence in PLM
A quick peek into some research on … the use of business intelligence in PLM provides insight on taking advantage of the tremendous amount of product data accumulating in today’s PLM systems. The research discusses how the maturation of manufacturers’ PLM implementations has created a tremendous volume of untapped information that can be leveraged to improve product innovation, product development, and engineering performance. As it has in previous enterprise applications (ERP, CRM, SCM, others), the time has come for manufacturers to tap into their growing information goldmines through the use of business intelligence (BI) tools.
Exponential Times – What Does it Mean for Manufacturing and PLM?
What I learned this week … came from watching the Did You Know 3.0 Video and asking myself what it means to the world of manufacturing and product lifecycle management (PLM). The answer? Quite a lot. If you haven’t seen the video, it is worth 5 minutes of your time to give you an entertaining and informative look into the times we live in. The part that really caught me was that we live in “exponential times.” Things are changing rapidly in our personal and professional lives, and manufacturers need to consider the ways the world is changing in order to be relevant with the right products (and the right processes) to capitalize on the future.
A Vision for PLM and Beyond – Dassault Systemes
I had the chance to talk with … Dassault Systemes CEO Bernard Charles and his team at Dassault’s 2009 customer conference today. I attended the general sessions in the morning and then spent some time speaking with DS execs in a smaller group setting. Once again, Bernard and the team painted a very different picture of PLM than some might have in mind. Dassault does PLM, but the vision does not stop there. It doesn’t matter if you call it PLM 2.0 (as Dassault does) or put some other label on it – DS has a very unique view on what the future will look like. And they have plans to play a broader role than CAD, CAE or product design.
People Tagging in Product Development
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).
Mining Social Network Emotions and Opinions for Product Development
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.