Posts Tagged People Centric PLM
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?
Vuuch: “We don’t see any thing else like it..”
Posted by Alex Neihaus in CAD, Enterprise Social System, PLM on August 24, 2010
Randall Newton has republished a interview with Chris from last fall. Randall commented then that Vuuch “…does add value to the product development lifecycle, so it fits in PLM.” This time, Randall notes Vuuch is “feisty.” We are enormously flattered by both Randall’s original and updated comments. To achieve the change in PLM and CAD that we believe the industry is ready for, Vuuch needs to be both unique and aggressive. PLM users seeking better product development workflow can count on us for both.
Now, about the map you see above. Chris is on vacation somewhere in Kenya…and I am in the office…thinking feisty thoughts and remembering the night I stayed at the Narok Travel Lodge (“A” on the map) before taking the road to the Maasai Mara reserve. Unlike many American tourists, my traveling companion and I weren’t flying from park to park. We had rented an SUV in Nairobi, loaded it up with spare tires (which we popped daily) and were driving by ourselves through the Kenyan countryside. We were crazy…flat out insane.
So, what does all this have to do with Vuuch? Simple: by refusing to take the conventional road in Kenya, we learned and saw and experienced things that many tourists never see or experience. (One day, I’ll tell you the story of how we convinced armed villagers not to shoot us by distracting them with Led Zeppelin songs. No kidding. You should see me cry when I hear Communication Breakdown.)
When Randall is talking about Vuuch being feisty, it’s because he knows that Vuuch isn’t going to “fly over” the issues in making the product development process better or gloss over the fact that PLM hasn’t really changed all that much in the way development teams work together. Randall knows that he can count on Vuuch for the much more authentic overland journey, at the end of which is real change and improvement for PLM users.
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.
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 V1 Release – Vuuch Wants You!
Posted by Chris Williams in News, PLM on September 28, 2009
Vuuch V1 is ALMOST ready!!!
The Vuuch beta program provided great confirmation of the Vuuch concept and feedback on what we needed to add to Vuuch. Through out the beta program we have been successful at getting a number of teams to start using the beta in production. Since SolidWorks World and the Vuuch beta release we have been working closely with people from all over the world and from teams developing all kinds of products. The result is Vuuch V1 – see the release notes.
Our current plan is to have a pre-release this week and production release next week. Success is on the move. Our goal for Vuuch V1 is to increase the number of teams using Vuuch in production. After broadcasting the release notes to registered users we have already doubled the number of teams that are signed up to use Vuuch in production. V1 is ready for prime-time. Take a look at the release notes, checkout the pre-release and connect with us about getting your team up and running with Vuuch. If you are not already a user register for a Vuuch account.
Vuuch wants you!!! Contact us at contact@vuuch.com to sign your team up to use Vuuch in production. Production users will define the features for V2. Vuuch is looking for a few good teams. Get ahead of the curve and take full advantage of the first and only People Centric PLM solution in the market.
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