A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

Next PLM Challenge: To Connect Process and Communities

Next PLM Challenge: To Connect Process and Communities
olegshilovitsky
olegshilovitsky
9 December, 2009 | 2 min for reading

Social is growing. During the past two years, we had seen many new topics introduced by social computing – social networks, communication, collaboration. A bunch of product were previewed, released… and already failed in this space. Enterprise 2.0 is growing as a separate and very interesting industry. The most visible social computing related movements in Product Lifecycle Management are DS Social Innovation and PTC’s Social Product Development – both pushing the power of social-network-like elements into PLM mainstream. I tried to analyze potential challenges in various aspects related to adopting of social software in Product Lifecycle Management and would like to share my thoughts and conclusions.

1. Organizational Social Network. With increased potential of social software, various communities of people will be established in the organization. They exist today. However, no software that can present it and support their activities. Transformed from various forums, portals, IM, wikis and other forms, these community building tools will play a role of “facebook of enterprise organization”.

2. Social Network interaction with Organizational Processes. Growing community activities in the organization will continue to take power of interaction between the people and. Therefore, questions of how business and organizational processes will be integrated into this communication will be raised very loud and very soon, in my view.

3. Community and Business Process co-existence. Ability to balance between well-defined development, engineering and other business processes compared to social intercommunication will become very important. Cannibalizing of each of them – communities or processes, can be very painful for organizations.

So, what is my conclusion today? Social networking in various appearances will be growing in enterprise and manufacturing organizations.They will become visible on different levels. The biggest potential mistake is to see them replacing “organizational business processes”. However, failing to establish a successful process management system (especially in development, engineering and manufacturing organization) can emphasize the role of social networks as a potential major process driver in an organization. To make it successful PLM needs to have a goal to connect organizational business processes with social networks. So, community-based interaction will be directed to replace business process management.

Just my thoughts. I will be looking forward to your comments.
Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
31 August, 2011

I’ve been attending SolidWorks Media day in Dassault SolidWorks campus in Concord, MA. Actually, I noted- this is probably the...

20 May, 2010

Process management is an important aspect and activity in Product Lifecycle Management. Multiple activities in product design, engineering and manufacturing...

29 June, 2025

The last few weeks, I’ve been spending a lot of time planning growing AI development of OpenBOM and thinking about...

3 August, 2010

Collaboration is a widely used term, and I found it sometime even overused. Collaborative development, Collaborative PDM, Collaborative PLM, Collaborative...

25 January, 2011

Last week, during PLM Innovation Congress in London, I talked about future trends in PLM and engineering software. If you...

10 January, 2018

Recent Forrester Wave report open a discussion in the industry about comparison between PLM vendors. I published m thoughts few...

30 March, 2016

The Congress on the Future of Engineering Software (COFES 2016) is coming next week. Traditionally, COFES is a great opportunity to...

14 November, 2017

I spent my yesterday morning at AU2017 Forge Developer conference. I featured keynotes in my previous article. So, today I...

29 September, 2010

We are in the middle of a very interesting process of digitalizing our life. We are moving more and more pieces...

Blogroll

To the top