Archive for category Social Media
PLM vendors to users: Let’s collaborate like it’s 1995
Posted by Alex Neihaus in Enterprise Social System, PLM, Social Media on August 31, 2010
Lately, the buzz surrounding social technology and product development has reached a fever pitch. Three recent posts with different, but intersecting, points of view have me thinking that unless we break out of the same old ways of thinking, nobody — save the incumbents selling the same old stuff — will benefit from a major shift in the way product development teams can work together.
Our friend Oleg has blogged about what he says are the five questions you should ask your PLM vendor about “collaboration.” Deelip Menezes has written about what he calls the “diminishing significance” of PLM. And bloggers at PTC continue to try to misdirect attention from their real agenda (a mother-of-all-heavyweight-social-platforms-on-SharePoint called “SocialLink“) with chirpy rehashes of a 2004 book called The Wisdom of Crowds. (Actually, a high-performance product development team would act more like the experts described in Malcom Gladwell’s 2005 book Blink than like the crowd of lemmings PTC envisions. But I digress.)
The common thread that runs through all three of these blog posts? Revolutionizing the way product development teams work simply has to be a technology platform that’s big — something really heavy — something based on PLM.
Oleg simply assumes that social technology — what he calls “collaboration” — is part of a PLM environment. So, Oleg wants to help by positing questions you might ask a vendor of something so heavy.
Deelip muses the PLM acronym might be disappearing…but doesn’t seem to catch the irony that changing the name (or smashing together resellers) doesn’t fundamentally change the technology in any way. Just check out the “unified theory of gravity” slide in Deelip’s post showing layers — and layers — and layers — of PLM-or-whatever-PTC-is-calling-it-now software. That vision sure ain’t no simplification when it comes to expanding PLM to users across the enterprise. And expansion is key to changing the product development process.
And PTC…well, you know what they think. They have to argue that social technology is just another function on their platform — or they risk losing upsell opportunities to current customers. Because marketing, sales, suppliers, partners, finance — just about anyone outside engineering — isn’t interested in PLM.
All of this is so 1995. Check out the Lotus Notes ad image at the top of this post. This ad was making the case for the Notes “platform” for, I think, release 4.6. This was around the time Microsoft — which hadn’t released Exchange yet — began eating our lunch with a simple message: “What you really want is email. This collaboration stuff is too big, too complex for mere mortals. And when you do need ‘collaboration’ — whatever that is — we’ll be there with something you can use via a wizard in Exchange.” (Actually, they waited to copy Lotus QuickPlace in SharePoint…but you get the idea.)
What did we do at Lotus? We were the incumbent, believe it or not. We had thought-leadership. People looked to us to come up the solution for collaboration. So, we came up with an ad showing someone with so many “capabilities” he’s got hands coming out of his head. To put it mildly, nobody wants to be this guy. Least of all the teams across the enterprise we envisioned collaborating with our platform.
Notes was great. I loved Notes (still do, actually). But we killed ourselves by making collaboration too big and complex. Microsoft emphasized what people could actually adopt — and in doing so, toppled Notes.
Any of this sound familiar? Isn’t it interesting how Siemens, PTC and DS look and sound like Lotus did? And (I really relish this comparison) doesn’t Vuuch sound a lot more like the that’s-what-I-really-want alternative Microsoft was pitching?
Vuuch has learned the lessons of being overweight and corrected for them in our enterprise social system. Vuuch is not a layer on a PLM platform. We know that can never work and is simply convenient for PLM vendors. Vuuch is not a “collaboration link” to something so massive you have to know what five questions to ask before you can even think about using it on a product development project.
Instead, Vuuch is a system with manufacturing “DNA” that connects people through deliverables so they don’t have to think about how to work together…they can just do it.
So, the question for product development teams is simple: are you going to party like it’s 1995 (sorry, Prince) when it comes to using social technology?
Enterprise Road Kill
Posted by Chris Williams in Enterprise Social System, PLM, Social Media on August 17, 2010
Ever since the consumer embrace of social networking applications there has been a land grab to take social into the enterprise. But guess what the consumer model CAN NOT work in the enterprise!
In the consumer landscape there are entire age groups that ignore email. This is not to say they do not message… they are just stuck on a different type of messaging, Facebook, BBM, IM and others. The truth is we humans love messaging. So what is it about messaging platforms and why do we use different solutions? The teen generation is not social networking in order to deliver work, they connect to stay up with what is going on and where the next party is. But at work we message to get something delivered. There is a huge value difference between these groups when comparing the impact of not reading something.
Do you read everything on your Facebook page? Of course not. Do you really need to read everything on your facebook page? Of course not. But at work we are drawn to read every email, the moment it arrives, because it might have something to do with what we are trying to get done… it might have something to do with our work and what we need to deliver.
So what about Facebook being used in a design team? It will never work! Jim wrote about this not to long ago http://tech-clarity.com/clarityonplm/?s=facebook. IMHO he missed the most important issue. Noise… You do not read everything on your Facebook page because most of it just doesn’t matter. Even though there is a high level of noise in consumer based social solutions every application provider that has targeted the enterprise with a social solution has used the same consumer model. The consumer social model is simple, you follow someone, ie you friend someone. Well can you imagine if you followed everyone you had some sort of working relationship with? YOUR INBOX WOULD EXPLODE and you would GET NOTHING DONE!
Enterprise social tools are going to endup road kill! It is only a matter of time before they become the next WAVE (see death of WAVE).
OK so why is a guy who is selling an Enterprise Social System for Manufacturing standing up and saying Enterprise Social Solutions are going to fail??? Simple. The relationship model in Vuuch is different and the relationship model in other social tools targeting the enterprise are wrong, wrong and wrong! Of course we have friends at work, people we have lunch with etc, but an Enterprise Social System must understand that our lunch relationships are not what we want when it comes to getting things done. An Enterprise Social System of course is people centric but more important it is content centric. An Enterprise Social System for Manufacturing also understands that our connections with content vary over time and that for any one piece of content a single person may have multiple connections. For example I might be the owner of a design specification, as well as I might be involved in two discussions about it and even more I might be resolving a set of issues requiring changes to the specification.
OK so why is a guy who is selling an Enterprise Social System for Manufacturing standing up and saying Enterprise Social Solutions are going to fail??? Simple. Content matters! In the enterprise people work to deliver very specific types of deliverables. The fact that content matters is no secret, but in the enterprise people are not going to sit around and blog, record videos of meetings or podcast, they are focused on getting something done. An Enterprise Social System for Manufacturing understands what the team is delivering, a product. For example if a design engineer needs to complete the design of a part they are not going to blog about what they are doing or record videos of the problems they have. That said they are going to record design issues that need to be resolved.
OK so why not make the PLM tools social? PLM tools cannot be social. PLM targets structure, control and is only embraced by a small number of users. Design issues are connected to everyone in the enterprise and cross multiple applications. Imagine a simple design problem that connects together a purchase order, a part and people from purchasing, the vendor and engineering. This simple problem touches the CAD and ERP systems and maybe PLM (in many cases it would not), but most certainly it connects to people who will never be a PLM user.
Enterprise Social Gold Rush
Posted by Chris Williams in Enterprise Social System, Social Media on August 9, 2010
Consumers go social and the enterprise will follow…
Ever since our consumer love affair with social networking applications there has been a gold rush or land-grab going on in the enterprise. But mapping the consumer model into the enterprise will not work. To me this is common sense but if you evaluate what has been done by 99% of the enterprise social based tools you will find they have directly copied the consumer model into the enterprise.
Why social in the enterprise? Again I think this is common sense. Within the enterprise people come together to get something done. Therefore the enterprise has people connecting to get thing done and is therefore social. Right? You could also say that people need to communicate and therefore they are being social. This I expect is not news to anyone since no matter where you look there is something going on with respect to the enterprise social land grab. If you use Salesforce then you know about Chatter. If you do a little Google you will find things like Yammer. If you follow Cisco then you know about the solution they are bringing to market that makes your phone and router more social. If you are a SAP user than you know about their new social solutions. And even CAD is getting into the game with things like social product development or collaborative 3d live (how many times have we heard this one)… No matter what you do in the enterprise you do not need to look hard to see the land-grab going on.
So is the enterprise social? I think yes!
Does the consumer social model work in the enterprise? Certainly not!
What do you think?
A Look At Use Cases
Posted by Chris Williams in News, PLM, Social Media, Vuuch Feature on June 2, 2010
We have just released some new features. The new features give you the ability to send a link to people for a Vuuch page and provide these people an ability to subscribe (join the community of people who care about the deliverable the page represents). For example here is a link for the Vuuch page for a use case presentation I shared with Ken Wong http://www.vuuch.me/collaboration/fileRepNW4/discussions/888. Navigate to the page and subscribe and you will be able to aprticipate in discussions about this presentation as well as download the presentation. Feel free to openly share this link and if you have questions about the presentation please ask.
I imagine this has stirred a number of questions. Well here are some of the ones I have heard so far:
- What if I want to constrain the subscriptions to a certain group of people? When you turn this feature on you can configure a list of domains the person must be part of in order to subscribe. For example if I wanted to constrain who could subscribe to only people from Vuuch I would configure the subscription domain to be vuuch.com. Therefore only people from this domain could subscribe.
- Can I create Vuuch activities that only a certian list of people can see? Yes absolutely. See next question.
- Is everthing on the page available to everyone? No not at all. When an item is created you decide who has access. You can open it all the way up by making it public or you can close it all the way down by defining a list of participants (like a list of participants for an email). And you can change this at anytime.
- Can I connect/relate this page to other Vuuch pages? Yes absolutely. And these related pages could be public or completely private. When you do this only those people that are involved with the related page will be able to navigate to the related page.
- So how might this functionality be used? OK you are thinking this is pretty cool but how might this functionality be used? Well here are a few examples of cases we have worked with a number of companies. See below.
Example Use Cases:
- PowerPoint Use Case (Presentation sent out to your field team):
Within the presentation a link is provided and if the sales team has an interest in asking questions about the presentation or accessing FAQ information then they can subscribe. And if they install the Vuuch for MS Office add-in they can do all this without leaving the presentation. You can imagine a sales person sitting in a Starbucks getting ready for a customer presentation and they want feedback on a certain slide. They go to the slide and type their question. Later when they are at the customer site and just before projecting they check the slide for the responses. The sales person never needs to leave the presentation as the presentation is the access point to all those who have an interest in the presentation. - Supplier of Components:
For example if you supplied motors you could create a Vuuch page for each of your motors and engage a community of people that use each motor. For example if I were searching for a motor I could go to this page and ask the community for feedback on the motor and/or get additional information about the motor. I could define issues and tasks that I would like the motor supplier to address for me. Right from this page they access a public and private community. - Green Materials:
Remember anything can be Vuuched. In this case the user is using an application for green product development, say Sustainable Minds and they are looking at different material characteristic within the application. They see a material they think might work but they are not familiar with this material. Well luck for them the material database has been Vuuched. So they link to the Vuuch page for the material they are looking at using. Here they can access additional information and ready discussions people are having. As well they can post their own questions. As well they could create private tasks for people in their organization to further investigate the material, for example maybe they ask purchasing where they could purchase the material and they ask quality to provide a review. Right from this page they access both a public and private community.
Facebook Your Autodesk Inventor Files
Posted by Chris Williams in Inventor, News, Social Media, Vuuch Release on May 18, 2010
Ken Wong wrote a first review of Vuuch for Inventor. I really enjoyed his explanation of Vuuch as well the video that he put together. He pointed out the solution that is “Facebook for Files” doesn’t have a Facebook fan page, so I guess I know what is on my agenda for today.
I look forward to following up with Ken as both the Vuuch platform and the Inventor add-in evolve. For anyone interested you can find a public Vuuch documentation page here. You might being asking yourself “Public Page”? Well although most items in Vuuch are private to your team it is possible to make information public. For instance maybe you want to ask an Engineering question or maybe you have a question about how to do something in your CAD system? Or maybe you want to create a public page for responses to a problem. The Vuuch documentation page provides access to not only the file but also any public questions people have about the file.
There are many use cases for Vuuch. In the demo Ken put together you can see how Vuuch replaces that Excel file your team is using to track part design issues. Another use case we have seen is when a drawing is being checked for release and you want to track all the items that need to be fixed. Vuuch the drawing file and create a Vuuch activity for each issue that is found. As each issue is correct by the team it can be either archived or forward it on to another team member to validate the change.
PLM Is The Monkey In The Middle
Posted by Chris Williams in PLM, Social Media on March 4, 2010
Jim Brown, no not that one, the other one, and I had a good volley over on his blog http://tech-clarity.com/clarityonplm/2010/sap-credit-plm/. The question at hand is what will happen to PLM and will ERP ultimately win the battle. When I first read his post I was thinking he agreed with this, but later he tells me no.
Let me simplify the situation in a cold hearted and over simplified manner. PLM wanted to be a Design tool, a Release tool and own the product through Manufacture and beyond. Well at best they are a Release tool (Release only PLM). Ya ya I know I am being a bully. But stick with me and we will get to the monkey. In this view PLM owns release and ERP owns Manufacturing and Design is owned by no one. Well if I was ERP I would be thinking about how to surround my enemy versus fight them face on for ownership of Release.
PLM becomes the monkey when Design has a solution. Vuuch is a Design solution that makes PLM the monkey. Imagine if through Design Vuuch Pages are created for all your deliverables and that these pages carry a complete definition of each part of the design. Now imagine if the Vuuch page for Part_A could be linked to the ERP record for Part_A. This is no dream. Through the WEB service of the ERP solution and the open API approach of Vuuch the complete view of Part_A becomes social and PLM becomes the monkey.
WEB INNOVATION
Posted by Chris Williams in Social Media on March 1, 2010
WebInno 25 is here. Tonight 10s of hundreds of Boston’s WEB Innovators will gather at http://www.webinnovatorsgroup.com/2010/02/17/webinno25-demo-companies/. At last count on http://webinno25.eventbrite.com/ there were more than a 1000. Pretty amazing for a lets get together and see what innovation happens to be going on. Ya and it is free, but bring some loot as there will be some great things to invest in and I’m sure the beer is not free. Vuuch will be there as a side dish.
Follow A Friend Makes No Sense
Posted by Chris Williams in PLM, Social Media, Vuuch Release on February 12, 2010
I have been thinking a lot about Facebook and other social tools lately. Mostly due to the fact that we used Facebook as a framework or analogy for the new release of Vuuch. As you all know we decided to make Vuuch public even before we had a working product. The idea behind this is we truly wanted to elicit feedback from users. Working with different types of teams and our prior release we discovered a number of user experience issues that we wanted to address in the new release. You can boil all of this down to two items, user habit and value of a consolidated view of what is going on. User habit is a tough nut and Outlook seems to be like crack cocaine or cigarettes. You know you shouldn’t but you just cannot help it… With respect to a consolidated view our beta users never really realized that when they created a discussion in their SolidWorks file Vuuch created a WEB page that represented this SolidWorks file. Armed with this data and filled to the brim with the caffeine needed to sit and watch how users worked, the product management team set off to twizzel a new plan.
We centered in on the idea that we needed to enforce the notion of the WEB page Vuuch creates when you Vuuch enable something. I must admit that we came to this conclusion working with a buddy that has the best job of all. He is a marketing VP for the largest domestic beer company in the US. Unlike us engineering types he spends his day trying to figure out how to make a bottle of beer and a bikini look good next to each other. Which really isn’t that hard… It struck us that Facebook was the right analogy. When you Facebook someone you are focused in on a specific person and anyone who might also care can see what is going on. In Vuuch rather than representing people we represent what people are working on.
Our next issue was Outlook and that ugly thing we call habit. Well instead of tilting windmills we jumped on the bandwagon and created an Outlook add-in. So if you are stuck in Outlook and cannot kick the habit you are safe with Vuuch. I must say the Buzz has been more than Google. The users that have tried the Outlook add-in do something very simple. They smile and say cool.
If you want to see these two things in action checkout the 60 second video http://www.vuuch.com/media/quick_outlook_demo.wmv.
Let me close by tying back to the title of this post. Social media or social network applications that are used in our personal lives revolve around the idea that you follow people. Many companies have taken this idea and built systems that target the enterprise. Well this is a great example of why linear thinking is easy and wrong. Following a friend makes perfect sense but following a colleague is going to do nothing but generate tons of noise. Think about the guy in the next cubical that work very closely with. Well even though you work together the majority of what they do does not affect you. If they are working on 100 items do you really care about each of these? No I think not, even if you are involved with each of them, which is most likely not the case. In an enterprise setting the value of following a person is much lower than the value of following a deliverable. Al la Facebook for files. Follow the files you care about and OH ya guess what when you have nothing going with that file Vuuch no longer pings your inbox.
Vuuch in the news
Posted by Chris Williams in News, Social Media on December 15, 2009
Design Engineering just wrote a nice article on Vuuch. It seems a little odd to be blogging about something you cannot get online but this is what I am doing. The article is only in the print versions of the Nov/Dec magazine. The article talks about Vuuch being used in design which is a great use case, but the new Vuuch plug-ins has expanded the number of Vuuch use cases. Using the PowerPoint plug-in you can quickly create a WEB page that represents the presentation you are working on. You can think of this page as a Facebook page for the presentation. The same is true for CAD files. The idea is if you are working on a deliverable that requires a community of contributors then drag that file into Vuuch and create a page for the file. Vuuch creates a WEB page that acts as a private community site for the deliverable. Once the page is created the team has a place to connect, discuss and track the progress of the deliverable. We are also working on an Outlook plug-in which will allow you to manage your deliverables where you already spend most of your day, Outlook.
The next time you are doing some WEB research you will want to use the Vuuch for your browser plug-in. Say you are searching for a new motor for that design you are working on. Well as you find WEB content that might solve your design problem, Vuuch the WEB pages and now your team can discuss these options within the context of the project you are working on.
Brainstorming The Definition of Vuuch
Posted by Chris Williams in Social Media on February 14, 2009
Brainstorming is a great opportunity to discover new ideas to old problems. Vuuch is the result of a series of brainstorming activities with customers and we will continue this process as we continue to expand Vuuch Design Discussions. As we demo’ed Vuuch during SolidWorks World 2009, everyone reacted with great excitement and came up with many new ideas for how to expand Vuuch. So with the juices flowing and a Vuuch vibe brewing we set to work adding a new feature to www.vuuch.com. Today, well all right, late last night, we launched a brainstorming section to the web site. Anyone can post ideas, comment and vote on the ones you think really vibe and those that you think really stink!
Give it a try and see what people think about your ideas…
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