A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

Non-PLM Think Tank: Why Teenagers Need Twitter?

Non-PLM Think Tank: Why Teenagers Need Twitter?
olegshilovitsky
olegshilovitsky
4 January, 2009 | 2 min for reading

On behalf of Ronni… Inspired by recent family events and PLM Think Tank recent posts :). 

Another case for Microblogs or a collaborative social software platform.

 How did I become the single point of access for transportation to and from a movie theater during the holiday season?  It started innocently enough.  A gifted class of thirty, residing geographically within 30 kilometers or so of the Tel Aviv metropolis, went on a week of winter vacation from school. Their platform of communication with each other is text messaging and emails.  Although they may be the most technologically talented group of teenagers, able to grasp new ideas at a rate much higher than their parents (who were also born before personal computers existed), their inherent organizational skills lag far behind their IQs.

 So what’s a parent to do?  Suddenly I found my cellphone being the central point of contact for this group of teenagers.  One of them initiated an evening at a movie theater but left the task of getting back and forth from the cinema open.  They decided to call me and ask if I had room in my car back and forth from the cinema.  I had already relayed the information about my son’s transportation to two people, and yet the phone calls continued.

 Would a Microblog be a solution? Or some sort of platform where the children would communicate with each other throughout the day, accessing one Microblog where they would know the number of children attending, which cities they were coming from, number of movie tickets to purchase, and number of places vacant in their parents’ cars in both directions.

 I am familiar with www.airset.com and have heard of Twitter, but it seems like these teenagers know more about the technology regarding the animation of the movie they have chosen to see than the logistics regarding collaborating on their destination and transportation. 

 This is just one example of one community collaborating on what should be a simple task, and yet the factors affecting this community are only some of those challenges affecting an small organization in its day-to-day operations – short deadlines, not all have access to computers  and the same data during the day, no license to drive cars (have to outsource transportation to their parents or older siblings), no authorization to use credit cards independently in order to purchase tickets in person (thus losing out on 2 for 1 discounts, etc.) and geographical dispersion within one country. 

 Microblog or Mommy to the rescue?  I’m not sure.

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
20 May, 2014

One size doesn’t fit all. This is especially true in enterprise software. It also applies to engineering organization and manufacturing...

17 March, 2009

In today’s world, more and more companies need to collaborate globally. In the supply chain, this is a result of...

9 May, 2011

I’m continuing to think about Amazon cloud failure. As you may have noticed, the “cloud” is a frequent topic on...

17 July, 2009

The key part of all news about Office 2010 is free, browser based version of Microsoft’s most popular Office products....

27 December, 2009

We are coming to the new decade, and I found interesting to drop my thoughts related to what I’d expect...

25 June, 2009

In my view, one of the things that is killing PLM the most is the level of technical details. I...

26 March, 2012

I’ve been reading twitter stream during my short weekend at home. One of the tweets from Randal Newton caught my...

16 March, 2010

The question of industry specific solutions in PLM was always interesting for me. Time ago, I asked in one of...

16 December, 2012

The simplicity of DropBox and similar cloud based file storage makes it very attractive to many people. Engineers are not...

Blogroll

To the top