Can We Improve Usability of PLM Software?

First of all, I’m sorry about such a topic. Yes, Usability! I think we have been talking about usability for last 20 or maybe even more years. Why this is very important today? In my view, we are going to achieve an interesting point of intersection between consumer software and enterprise software. From my standpoint, there are few consumer-oriented or general enterprise software are getting very close to some of the functional capabilities provided by PDM/PLM providers.

1. Management and sharing on documents
2. Messages and Flow
3. Content collaboration

Few interesting blog posts got to my attentions related to the topic of usability in enterprise software. One is Enterprise Software Can NoLonger Remain Unusable. What was very cool is to see a fresh user experience of IFS- nice, and I’d say iPhone like.

One more observation came out of the following post by Scott Monty. I found the following comparison between Apple, Google and Enterprise Software pretty smart and make sense. I’d say PLM (and not only PLM) vendors need to think about that seriously.

I will continue with  more posts related to usability. But, what is my conclusion for today? Despite the fact, I see a very significant level of improvement in specific product in the market and some very nice and fresh UIs, on the broad range, change is demanded.

What do you think?
Best, Oleg