Key Success of SharePoint – What Should PLM Learn?

Nice post, Oleg. I agree with your reasons for Sharepoint being such a success. To me one other big reason for the success of Sharepoint is the fact that it connects (almost) seamlessly with the main workplace of knowledge workers: Outlook and Office. Many tools seem to forget that and ‘integrate’ with Outlook and Office later. Or simply say: stop working in Outlook and/or Office.

Samuel, Oleg hi,

I agree with the success of Microsoft applications in general. They are able to embed infrastructure (sharepoint capabillities) in their common office products, which makes it natural to extend when file management is needed.

PLM has the problem, that I assume 80 % of the companies who have implemented a PLM-enabled system, are just using it for file management – exactly the same scope as SharePoint.

The challenge is beyond file management for both SharePoint and real PLM systems – here they need to be visible at a strategic level

Best regards

Jos

Hi Oleg,

Thanks for the post. There is a twist with SharePoint adoption. Another secret of SharePoint success is that it is being positioned as a platform AND as a product at the same time. The idea of “it does something out of the box and we all (IT, business, devs) can extend it to our liking” looks really appealing on many levels, just like you noticed. Perhaps, this is the reason why some organizations who failed SharePoint implementations try it over and over again – they simply do not blame it on the product.

From architect’s perspective, however, SP is by far not the best product/platform ever. Many “adoptions”, are just sharing files or even turn dead after a month or so – should one count these as successful implementations? I think it is not as much about playing “trojan horse”, as about helping business to extract some value right away.

Sandip, Thanks, I’m aware about what TC community is doing. There are sales advantage in leveraging SharePoint as an infrastructure and this is what TC is trying to present, in my view. However, as far as I understand TC community is a product focused on the cross-company / supply chain usage. This is not the strongest SharePoint deployment option which is mostly deployed for department level. On the departmental level competition between basic PDM and SharePoint will be obvious as well as an interest of companies to use SharePoint to manage CAD files… Best, Oleg

Oleg, when you combine SharePoint with a zero cost PLM tool such as Aras Innovator then you have a significant tool set. Nice thing about it is that as you point out, all of this can be deployed without the suits getting involved. An entire PLM deployment can be up and running without a single C-level meeting. The monolithic PLM guys can be spending months putting their PowerPoint slidedecks together for the CIO while the Innovator and SharePoint adopters can be off solving actual business problems.

I think the point of Oleg’s post is to parallel the mode of adoption of PLM with Sharepoint’s success in contrast to basing PLM on the Sharepoint platform. In the latter case my opinion is Sharepoint is not a good platform under PLM. We use Sharepoint based Insight data manager with Solid Edge CAD and it is craptastic. Putting the document files in the database is a really bad idea. I much prefer a separate vault for files.

I do think the current PLM suppliers need to better integrate with Office and Sharepoint and that is beginning to happen. But integration to other applications is probably more important for PLM.

On the former point I think the difference between the PLM and Sharepoint examples is that Microsoft had the ubiquity of MS Office to use as a foot in the door for Sharepoint. For PLM the corresponding piece would be CAD tools. The variety of CAD tools in use even within one organization is much broader by comparison so it is not as easy to piggyback PLM on an installed base of a particular CAD tool. I would not look to a CAD vendor for PLM.

Great topic for debate! I look at the evolution of PLM sales to be not so binary. I believe the lifecycle of PLM has actually experienced the phase where they put the content management element into the hands of anyone and everyone. Then there was the phase the PLM was a toolkit for the organization to build it around the needs of their organization. Both of those methodologies left the engineering organizations very disatisfied with the costs, complexity, lack of growth opportunity and integration and data migration nightmares (PLM companies had VERY bad data transition issues). Now the PLM companies see the revenues and opportunity to look like champs if they can get one instance at the highest level of the organization.

With regards to the point that higher sale is equal to higher risk, that is because the expectations and leadership was not truly aligned. You see this in about any enterprise level implementation. PLM in a sense has just “grown up”. Companies like accenture, PTRM and others and now seeing this as a clear strategy and long term investment for product development companies.
PLM companies were not built with the intention of adding portlets like the sharepoint model. You can’t really build the complexity as you go. If you don’t tie in the organizational level decisions early, you are hosed in trying to reconfigure the system later. For PLM companies to be successful, they need to have customers who understand this and these decisions need to be made at the “C” level. Failures to implement are usually tied to lack of governance and coordination in the organization. Just my thoughts…..

Raymond.

Andy, Agree. There is an advantage on “pay me later” approach, since you are getting in, and you can manage this opportunity from the “inside” position. However, in my view, the challenge for such approach is how not to be under-budget (for insider project) and how to be profitable (for contracting companies). Best, Oleg

Oleg – interesting post on the success of Microsoft SharePoint with the aid of a stealthy sales process. I read an interesting article on how a manufacturing company (Borg Warner) is using SharePoint to manage several of their key engineering processes here: http://www.deskeng.com/articles/aaaswb.htm

Oleg,

Problem with this approach from my experience has been that the unwillingness to change (no matter how paper or absurd the current processes are) is usually at the worker level. My experience is that PLM is proven out in one group and then slowly rolled out to other groups. I think the big error with any enterprise implementation is the “ta-da” effect. That is when the team goes off for a year and comes back to the organization for the unveiling and say’s “ta-da”. That is the recipe for doom. Success is about bringing the team along at a pace fast enough to get the job done but slow enough to adopt and accept change as you move from group to group. I loved the saying of one of my leads when she referred to our deployment methodology. “You can only eat the elephant one bite at a time”. Too often these large implementations go wrong because the development team gets overwhelmed with requirements. They follow a waterfall approach and the process for change is disasterous.

P.S. My question is why is PLM so much clunkier to use for the average user than sharepoint!!!!

Raymond.