Extensive development of social trends and connection between social trend and product lifecycle management got me to think more about intellectual property of PLM and related product information, business process etc. How we handle it today and how we will handle it in the future? I can see three parallel trends – all of them brought me to the same question of how much PLM worth and how organizations and individuals will be able to manage it in a corporate and social ecosystem we have.
Trend 1: PLM IP in the organization.
PLM vendors and services providers are using the term PLM IP very often. Which means companies are developing products and business processes in the organization that accumulates product and organization IP. This is the way I’m taking PLM IP. The lifecycle of products is much longer than the lifecycle of products and technologies. So, the question how organizations will preserve IP around PLM implementations.
Trend 2: 3D/CAD Online Content
I can see growing effort to develop online content. It comes in different ways – online portals with 3D models (I had chance to write about it last week in the post “3D Warehouse Parade“) and content web sites like cadooku (thanks Gabi Jack blog post for reference) that thinking how to trade 3D models between people. Growing amount of online content with future involvement of OEM and suppliers will raise a question how to preserve and manage this content and IP.
Trend 3: CAD Publishing Effort
My assumption is that CAD vendors took an idea of publishing as an efficient way to answer on the old question about CAD formats and interoperability. I can hear voices saying – format is not relevant anymore, we can publish content. So, efforts like PTC Arbotext, DS 3DVIA Composer, Autodesk Inventor Publisher (presented yesterday on AU2009, thanks Al Dean for his post and video) becomes very popular.
So, what is my conclusion? As a customer, I want to be able to own my PLM IP. Product models, designs, manufacturing instructions, Bill of Materials, ECO processes, Supplier’s models. How can I do it? I think this is a question we’ll need to answer in the near future.
Just my thought. What is your opinion?
Best, Oleg
