Social creates a lot of buzzes nowadays. Believe it or not, but more than 72% of people in U.S. are now on Facebook. It is impossible to ignore, and I can see companies that trying to apply the idea of social networking to other places. PLM is one of them. Vuuch was one of the companies that pioneered the ideas of “social @ work”. Nuage is another one that came just recently by introducing Nuage Cafe social app as a first step towards fully blown PLM.
I’m not sure if “social” magic will make PLM idea more prominent. I think the devil in details. Working for enterprise and corporate clients is a different story. It is much different than Facebook. One of the companies that doing a great job by selling “social story” to enterprises is Yammer. I was reading BrainYard blog earlier this week called – Yammer Updates Emphasizes Enterprise, Cloud Search. What was interesting in this story is a connection made between Yammer social functionality and other on premise and cloud applications in the company. Yammer propose something they call “universal search”.
…Yammer’s concept is different. To Yammer, universal search makes it possible to search across connections to both enterprise and cloud-based systems integrated with a Yammer network. For example, a search by customer name might turn up automated updates from Salesforce.com, SAP, and a Microsoft SharePoint site, as well as posts by users about that company.
The idea of search crossing cloud / premise boundaries is another interesting point.
All the data that gets pulled out of systems to populate the ticker or activity feed also gets indexed for universal search,” CEO David Sacks said in an interview. “It really addresses the problem of how to get universal search across cloud applications. Traditionally, enterprise search appliances just crawl all the data behind the firewall.”
I think, Yammer take is interesting because it confirms that manufacturing (and other enterprise organizations) cannot live in “social vacuum”. You can bring Facebook to the organization, but without connecting social network to the right data sources, you will be struggling with your ability to deliver real value. Search is a fundamental mechanism to bring disconnected pieces of data together. PLM companies are thinking a lot about how to make it work. Almost all PLM companies in the past made OEM agreement with enterprise search solution (Authonomy, Endeca, etc.). Dassault Systemes moved forward and acquired Exalead to make search work across DS products. Siemens PLM just released TeamCenter Active Workspaces – innovative applications that use a search as one of the paradigms to access data. Startup companies like Inforbix(*) are experimenting with different ways to aggregate content across disparate applications to make it easy available.
What is my conclusion? Social is not a magic that converts enterprise software and PLM to “gold” overnight. You need to think how to “embed” social into your company infrastructure, connect it to other solutions. This is the only way to make it work. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
*Disclosure – I’m co-founder of Inforbix.
I’m coming to COFES 2012 this week. COFES (The Congress on the Future of Engineering Software) is a think-tank event and one of my favorites. For the next 3 days, I’m going to put myself under the sun in Scottsdale, AZ. COFES publish the list of key participants – you can see it by navigating the following link. I was looking at COFES 2012 agenda earlier this week. The formal topic of COFES 2012 is the intersection of design and risk. Here is the quote from COFES website.
We all address risk daily, each in our own way. In design, risk is a consideration in each decision we make. But how and when we think of risk needs to change, most notably our risk horizon is much lower than our reward horizon. That is, we’ll often take a larger risk if the consequences are further away from us. Expediency is often the heart of our shortsightedness.
COFES agenda has a formal boundary and contains keynote, technology and vendors suites briefing, analyst briefing and roundtable. However, the most important thing at COFES is an opportunity to talk and have a “networking” with people there. Navigate to this link to see COFES 2012 agenda. The topics of briefings, conversations and meetings is something that you want to review first. I did my review last week and back to this today again. Below I put some of my pre-COFES observations.
Cloud… Cloud… Cloud…
I counted word “cloud” 24 times in the COFES 2012 agenda. I think it means a lot. Cloud is going to be a significant topic on the COFES discussion table. I found few interesting sessions about the cloud. Akoya, Autodesk, Intel and Microsoft are going to talk about cloud during technology briefings. Monica Schnitger is going to talk about cloud during her “The channel and the cloud” analyst brief. Jim Brown is going to present a cloud topic during his cloud and social computing session. I found the following passage from Jim’s intro interesting:
How are the Cloud and Social Computing Changing Business for the Next Generation? The Cloud and Social Computing have already begun to change the way business works and poses many new challenges. It has also opened the door to entirely new business models and opportunities. The first waves of digital natives hit the shores of businesses about 10 years ago and are rising up the corporate ladder. What happens when the next wave—cloud and social computing natives—start impacting business. How is your business likely to evolve?
Finally, the topic of one of roundtables is “Where is my data”? is also related to the cloud:
Where’s My Data? Local, distributed, private-cloud, public cloud: What belongs where? For some, does it really matter? Which aspects of data need to be under my direct control? Why? When does it matter? When it matters, where do I draw the line? Does it matter who controls the data when it’s clear who owns it? For that matter, when do I want my data to expire?
I’ve been writing a lot about the cloud on my blog recently. Navigate here to read more.
PLM and PDM divorce
Another topic that caught my attention was the topic of separation between PDM and PLM. The topic will be presented by Chad Jackson as Decoupling of PDM and Process. The topic came to my attention few time due the recent Autodesk and Aras strategies to integrate PDM and PLM offerings. Navigate to my previous blog to read more about that.
Decoupling PDM and Process. The holy grail of PLM (and BIM, for that matter) has been true integration of product data, engineering process, and downstream process. Now we’re hearing that there’s value in keeping engineering data management separate from processes. What’s going on here? Where does this decoupling of product and process make sense? Are we done with the idea of an all-encompassing homogeneous solution? Is this simply a divergence, an acknowledgement of reality, or an entirely new opportunity?
PLM and The Single Source of Truth
Another interesting topic that drove my attention was analyst briefing by Michele Boucher of Aberdeen related to so-called Single Point of Truth. This topic resonated with one of my previous blog posts – PLM and “The Whole Truth” problem.
Single Source of Truth versus Federated Models. The increasing complexity of today’s products, including the involvement of multiple engineering disciplines such as mechanical, electrical, and software, means there is a tremendous amount of data and data types to manage. What are the best ways to manage it all? Is having it all in a single database (Single Source of Truth – SSoT) the best approach? Where is SSoT a good fit? Where does it fall down and a federated model become more effective?
So, I’m sure COFES will bring more topics to discuss on the blog. I will be actively twitting from COFES. The hashtag is #COFES2012. You’re probably can be interested to following other COFES attendees on twitter. Here you can find COFES Twitter directory. I’m looking forward to keep you busy with my posts, tweets and pictures.
Best, Oleg
Well… I hope got some attention with this provoking title 
. Social is trending topic these days. However, let me put a very bold statement – after few years of excitement, I haven’t seen any example of “social software” success in the enterprise manufacturing company. Now, “social software” in my view is not related to social media and obvious need to screen employees Facebook and twitter accounts. There are all absolutely important actions. I’m taking about the fact “social software” or something that sometime called “Enterprise 2.0” software doesn’t make any significant change in the way enterprise software works in manufacturing companies. In other words, no signs of mainstream usage.
Enterprise 2.0 Failure?
Last year, I was reading Laurie Buczek’s article The Big Failure of Enterprise 2.0 Social Business. Take a look, in my view, there are some very rational points there. I found the following passage interesting:
The big failure of social business is a lack of integration of social tools into the collaborative workflow. This is not a newly identified problem. Those of us working on social collaboration efforts for a while recognized that integration is imperative from the beginning. At the beginning, I clearly outlined integration as one of three foundational pillars for our strategy. Unfortunately, various forces created challenges in this space. Social collaboration applications have been immature in this area for years (even after fierce calls for faster integration- i.e. CMS). Enterprises faced fork lift integration efforts to knit applications together. Fork lift efforts get the budget axe when push comes to shove. We managed to do the normal IT deployment model – the very model I fiercely advocated for us not to do. We deployed just another tool amongst a minefield of other collaborative tools – without integration. To make it even harder, we underinvested in transition change management.
The lack of integration is critical. Social software just created another silo in enterprise. This simple conclusion is important to understand, in my view.
Social is just another feature
It is interesting to see how PLM and other vendors threat social. If you are in the enterprise business, you are probably familiar with this strategy – “our software supports social features”. You can find evidence of such a strategy in many places. Maybe the best example of social integration is a feature can be found in AutoCAD – it is just a command. Navigate to WorldCAD Access blog to read the article – Social media becomes commands in AutoCAD 2013.
I recommend you to listen to Facebook Investor Roger McNamee Explains Why Social Is Over. Navigate to the following link to read the article and watch video. Here is an interesting quote from the summary:
Don’t try to be “social”: the big social platforms are created. You can’t create a social company, it’s just a checkbox. “The last 500 social companies funded by the VC community are all worthless. I’m serious.”
Integration and User Experience are the key
There are two important things that, in my view, can make a difference in the future of social software. Integration and user experience. Social web created a completely different level of expectation for software. It is a different user experience. To have it successfully replicated and integrated into mission critical business processes can make a difference. One of interesting examples I’ve seen recently is the announcement of Yammer integration into SAP Software.
Yammer, software for creating social networks inside businesses, just released a new feature that connects Yammer with the central component of SAP’s enterprise resource planning software. That means SAP customers can have on their computer screens a network ticker, like the updating sidebar on a Facebook page. Instead of the latest news about friends, this sidebar delivers updates whenever something relevant to people’s jobs happens inside their SAP systems.
Another interesting example came from Nuage -new company announced very recently on a horizon of PLM. It is still very little can be found on their website. One of the resources Nuage shared is a whitepaper by Jim Brown of Tech-Clarity. Read more about this on Jim’s blog – Social Business – What if Facebook Didn’t Fail for Product Development? The important quote from Jim’s whitepaper is the following one:
The greatest benefit will come from combining the collaborative power of social computing with the control provided by PLM. As Going Social with Product Development explains, “While social networking by itself can provide value, companies that develop a strategy to leverage the concepts behind social computing in a product development business context will likely gain greater advantages in product profitability than others.”
What is my conclusion? I think, companies made first initial baby-steps in social enterprise over the past few years. Few important lessons: 1/magic word “social” does solve the problem; 2/user experience is very important; 3/integrate into mainstream business flow and solve significant business pain is a key. I would like to quote one of my friends saying that this is what differentiate between “pain-killer” and “vitamin” software. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
picture courtesy of w3c social web report.
