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?
[...] of them. Collaborative design, collaborative PDM, collaborative engineering… what else? Vuuch blog about collaboration made me think about some lessons related to the development of systems that [...]
[...] of them. Collaborative design, collaborative PDM, collaborative engineering… what else? Vuuch blog about collaboration made me think about some lessons related to the development of systems that [...]
Alex, Agree 100%, the most important question is how to simplify the ability of people to work together (aka – to collaborate). I believe, Vuuch is drinking the social software kool-aid (instead of joining 1995-style parties) and thinking how to reuse Web 2.0 stuff to improve collaboration. The potential danger is to fall into PLM out-of-the-box, easy to use and ready-to-go trend used by PLM marketing during the last 3-5 years explaining how to make PLM implementations. Best, Oleg
Thanks, Oleg.
I hear you — we do need to be careful that we don’t make what isn’t easy sound easy. Nobody wins when that happens — and vendors are famous for doing it.
However, we really believe that if a social system makes use of a meme — in this case the way people already know how to use a social network — then it’s a valid claim. That’s why we’ve done with Vuuch.
Is this like changing the name to protect the innocent?
[...] So, as they say in programming terms…move along, there’s nothing here. I can, however, recommend Chris’s thoughtful discussion of referencing in Vuuch. And you might also enjoy my post from earlier this week on “collabaoration” in PLM. [...]