The future of invisible PLM is here – Google Location History

The technology can make a difference. What technological approach can make a difference in the future of PLM? This is a question many of us are asking these days. Ease of adoption is a problem for PDM and PLM from the early beginning. Existing technology created a levle of disruption engineers and other people involved into the process are not able to tolerate. Think about designer or engineer working on CAD model. The last thing engineer is interested in is how to check-in and check-out the design in order to keep the history of changes. Let’s think future about engineering processes. It is very inefficient to ask engineering and manufacturing people manually track every change to capture ECO and other processes related to changes of product structure and follow up decisions / actions. So, data management and process management shouldn’t be a burden on top of existing product development activities. Hidden data management, invisible PDM… these are thing that compelling as a future values of PLM technologies nowadays.

Techcrunch article this morning was a mind shake for me. Google’s Location History Browser Is A Minute-By-Minute Map Of Your Life. The article speaks about Goole ability to track you location in an absolutely transparent way using smartphone and your Google account. For those of your who remember Google Latitude, the fact Google can track your location shouldn’t be a big surprise. What was impressive is the level of transparency Google captured data.

I looked over my account and found quite precise history of my locations for the last weeks in variety places. Take a look on few screenshots I made.

The next picture shows my movement inside of Las Vegas Autodesk University venue.

What is my conclusion? The future of invisible PLM will be driven by the ability to capture information and processes in a transparent way. The transparency will allow to PDM and PLM technology to be adopted in a painless way to capture business processes and engineering changes. Context usage will play another important role in the future transparency of enterprise systems. Location context is just a beginning. Future context will include, people, department, calendar, product data and many others. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg