I want to come back to the topic that drives more of my interest lately – BIM and PLM. In my view, PLM and BIM have some future potential. It will come from “post-interoperability” world – the word when vendors stop fighting data and will start a fight for openness. I was writing about that almost four years ago in my post – PLM and BIM: Common Roots or Common Future? We are still not in the post-walled-garden world, and I’m not expecting it coming soon. This post is not about a bright future of PLM/BIM 3.0, but about some observation about similarity in failure of both PLM and BIM.
I’ve been reading an article in aecbytes – Getting a BIM Rap: Why Implementations Fail, and What You Can Do About It. The article is talking about two main non-technological aspects related to implementation and adoption of BIM practices and products – people factor and change factor. Here is my favorite passage:
BIM implementation is not really about software. It’s about organizational change—and wrenching, disruptive change at that. Our experiences—and the experiences of our clients—have demonstrated that people and processes are far more important than technology.
Of course, BIM is an absolutely wonderful tool, and it has great potential to streamline costs and processes, to help different disciplines communicate effectively and to ensure little confusion on a job site. But to get to that promised land of benefits, you have to pass through the wilderness of adoption, which always seems to hinge on organizational change, not technology. This is the inconvenient truth.
It made me think about additional aspects of commonality between PLM and BIM – they fail in the same way. Which led me to some thoughts related to adoption of both PLM and BIM software.
People
Do you remember the following post I made a year ago – PLM: How to Fix Technologies and Stop Fixing People? I wrote it after listening to John Gage keynote at COFES 2011. One of the phrases resonated – “Technology is easy. People are hard“. The influence of people is a significant factor in software product implementation that requires from people to re-think the way they are doing their business. Both PLM and BIM software can eliminate some roles in organizations and change business processes between organizations. It makes the process of software adoption long and complicated. This is a place where failure comes very often.
Changes
Changes is another aspect, which very often comes together with data and process oriented software like PLM and BIM. The specific character of almost every enterprise-level data and process management software is to focus on how to change organization – improve processes, re-organize business relationships, change tools, etc. It is extremely hard to people, since change is hard. So, it leads to failures.
What is my conclusion? To work with people is hard. To make a software for people is double-hard. The time when software adoption was a problem of people is in the past. “Consumer behavior” is coming to enterprise software. Vendors in both PLM and BIM domains need to take a note and re-think the way software works. Painless adoption, user experience, adaptive behavior related to potential change – these elements need to become a priority for the next wave of PLM and BIM software. Just my thoughts…
The beginning of the year is a good time to think about BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals). Cloud was one of the dominant topics for the past two years of blogging on PLM Think Tank. So I decided to make a step up and think beyond one-page blog article. Two publications inspired me to do so – Tech-Clairty publication A maturity model for Product Data Accessibility and Oracle whitepaper – Cloud Computing Maturity Model. It made me think about how to summarize the current state of PLM industry and the development of cloud solution into something that will make a practical sense for manufacturing companies and help them to decide about their PLM cloud strategies.
Actually, I found interesting the fact cloud PLM was around for the last decade. Arena Solutions was pioneering PLM on the cloud since early 2000s. Recently, I figured out that Arena Solutions (original name – BOM.COM) passed multiple transformations on their way to position their product and strategy. In the following video, Eric Larkin (Arena’s co-founder) explains how Arena passed from the original idea of BOM.COM via PLM on Demand to the cloud BOM and change management on the cloud
I found very interesting to listen and compare Larkin’s talk to Steve Bodnar’s intereview explaining Autodesk Cloud PLM approach. In my view, Autodesk is clearly playing a role of “fast-second” by trying to learn from mistakes of PLM industry and advantages of cloud technologies.
Crowd-sourcing and Maturity Model development?
Here is my challenge. I want to apply the idea of a crowd-sourcing via blogging to the development of PLM cloud maturity model. I will be publishing PLM cloud maturity model in the end of each month and learn from comments and feedback with a hope to come something meaningful at the end of the year.
What is my conclusion? A short conclusion is mostly related to two videos I shared with you. It is interesting to compare Cloud PLM as it perceived by Arena Solutions – company pioneered cloud PLM solutions for the past decade and dominant CAD vendor taking advantages of the resources and learning from the experiences and mistakes of last 10 years of development. I’m looking forward to hearing back from you about what do you think about cloud adoption and PLM cloud maturity model. I hope it will be an interesting journey… Just my thoughts.
Please welcome a new-old word – multiplatform. When did you hear about for the last time? For those of you counting 15+ years in the industry it reminds the time CAD was a place of heavy workstation with ***NIX operation systems, etc. For a very long period of time, CAD and PLM were a place where 99% of software was developed on top of Microsoft platforms. I touched this topic in my blog almost a year ago. Navigate to this link to refresh your memories. So, I decided to come again to this topic.
The diversity of software-development platforms for engineering and manufacturing these days is much broader than 2-3 years ago. Apple, Table, Android, iPad – all these names came to the play recently and changed the landscape of what we do. Take a look on the following chart I made playing with these names on Google Trends:
PLM – Legacy and Integration Services
These two topics become even more important in the context of multiple platforms and enterprise software (PLM is a typial use case). Existing implementations need to be support. Service companies and IT will make implementation and develop new solutions based on the software provided by vendors. This is a very complicated set of dependencies.
What is my conclusion? I think, world changed again, and we are moving from mono-development culture to multiple platforms again. It raises multiple decision points in front of software vendors and service providers. It looks like coming years will provide a bigger challenge to these companies to make a right choice about how to balance between legacy and future, existing platforms and future trends. Just my thoughts…
After my publication PLM, Autodesk and Cloud Wars Club few days ago, I received few comments from my readers trying to figure out what is PLM vendors’ position with regards to the cloud. One of them, even tried to rank PLM companies on how they committed (or not) to the future of cloud computing. The [...]
Blogosphere and other literature are full of remarks about companies that stuck in different phases of PLM process. You probably had a chance to read Aras’ Frustrated by a stuck PLM project? blog post last year. Recent Autodesk announcement of Nexus PLM raised again many publications about the complexity and sophistication of existing PLM implementations. [...]
Manufacturing business become global even for very small companies these days. It is not unusual to see a company of 100-150 employees having multiple locations using suppliers world wide. How these businesses can survive globally and what systems they need to use? What solutions are available today to support global product development? I decided to [...]
Have you heard about “Consumerization” in IT? I’m sure you had a chance to read about this trend. If not, navigate to the following Wikipedia link. The idea, in a nutshell, is related to a growing usage of the application and devices originally available in the consumer space in enterprise and/or business. Consumerization is a stable [...]
ROI is an important topic, and many times I’ve seen customers are not focusing on ROI assessment before starting PDM/PLM implementation. At the same time, I always found ROI definition and calculation as somewhat mystical. One of my best slides about ROI belongs to CIMData. SolidWorks made available PDM ROI calculator. I find an CIMData [...]
Process vs. Data. I think, this topic not requires a special introduction. In my view, every PLM implementation is facing this discussion and requires to take a decision about how to proceed. Few conversations with customers during DSCC 2011 last week and some articles I read on the long flight from Boston to Europe during [...]
Buying enterprise software is different experience from busing consumer goods or even automobile. Direct cost (licenses) is very often is a small fraction of the overall cost. So-called Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is combined from multiple elements – licenses, maintenance and support, implementation, etc. Few days ago, I was reading an interesting article in [...]
I want to come back to the topic that drives more of my interest lately – BIM and PLM. In my view, PLM and BIM have some future potential. It will come from “post-interoperability” world – the word when vendors stop fighting data and will start a fight for openness. I was writing about that almost four years ago in my post – PLM and BIM: Common Roots or Common Future? We are still not in the post-walled-garden world, and I’m not expecting it coming soon. This post is not about a bright future of PLM/BIM 3.0, but about some observation about similarity in failure of both PLM and BIM.
