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
30 March, 2022

In the manufacturing world, there is a lot of talk about documents and information flow. What’s the difference? And which...

30 January, 2012

Cloud is hyping in 2012. Coming Facebook IPO can only supercharge the future of cloud computing. Last year Autodesk announcement...

17 June, 2011

One of the products I had a chance to review more closely earlier this week was PTC Social Link. I...

7 August, 2012

Cloud PLM, Social Collaboration, 3D Experience, Consumerization… If you are breathing the air of design, engineering and manufacturing technologies and...

31 August, 2015

SME was always a different nut to crack for PLM vendors. My last year article “Why PLM vendors stuck to...

8 January, 2011

One of my twitting buddies, Jonathan Scott, re-twitted the link to the following article – CIO Strategies: The Private and Public Clouds...

10 December, 2014

Cloud PLM adoption is growing. More PLM vendors these days are re-branding and re-building  product and software architecture to keep...

7 January, 2014

Social topic might have another interesting turn. During few days off I had last week, I was reviewing unread social...

16 December, 2013

Have you heard about crowdsourcing? If not, do it quickly and now. It was coined back 6-7 years ago. Wikipedia...

Blogroll

To the top