I think everybody wants to be open these days. We are moving from the closed world to the open world. Information exchange, News, Social Software, Enterprise 2.0… this is only short list of examples. Thinking about PLM as an industry, I came to the conclusion that our industry is relatively closed and it probably impacts us in general. I started to figure out how it is possible to build open Product Lifecycle Management. These thoughts are not necessarily related to specific products or companies. This is something broader and spreads between communities, industry and technology…
I’ve thought about five possible ways to build Open PLM:
- Evangelism. In today’s modern society, evangelists are people that promote ideas and technologies related to a particular product or industry. We need such people. Not only the people who promote PLM of particular company, but also people who have cross-product knowledge, promote ideas and principles of Product Lifecycle Management. We need to have more cross-functional people that are able to become evangelists.
- Learning from the past experience. We should not be afraid of learning from the past and talk about mistakes and things that went wrong. Everybody make mistakes and our industry needs to learn from these mistakes. We need to make honest and open assessments of our past successes and failures.
- Building connections. We have lots of people in this industry called CAD/CAE/PDM/PLM…. We need to be able to collaborate cross teams, people, companies, customers and other communities – smoothly. It will allow us to function in more efficient way.
- Creating One-Stop place to share information. I know one stop shop for everything, which is probably called Google… or Blog (Better Listening on Google). However, talking seriously, we depend on each other, and the ability to get one-stop place to see most of the industry-related information is one of the keys.
- Solving problems of customers. Finally, PLM needs to solve customers’ problems. Whatever company products are, PLM needs to create perception of something that works efficiently, provides value and, yes, SOLVES PROBLEMS. The purpose is that customers will come to us and make us stronger.
So far, I understand these are probably not simple steps to go. Even so, I believe it’s possible… What do you think?
