I can see multiple debates these days related to the social software – Social Networking, Microblogging and others. Despite the absolute success of websites like Facebook and Twitter, there are still a lot of questions related to benefits of such software and experience for enterprise and product development. I see two possible direction, social software can be used in product development and PLM: Collaboration and Business Analytics. Collaboration was the first obvious space, where developers of CAD and PLM software focused on. It was pretty simple. Web 2.0 apps drove lots of interest and provide attractiveness to be applied in the product development. However, the second option seems to me very interesting.
Product Intelligence and Social Trends Analysis
I had chance to come across the following post on BrainSolis blog. Brian wrote about Twitter trending topics and potential power of untapped information that located in Twitter. It made me think more globally about possible usage of analytics in analyzing trending topics on the market of specific products as well as related problems such as deflects, claims and other situations. You can, for example, to use tools that calculate number of times a specific word or phrase mentioned on twitter.
Product Development Tools Evolution
What do you think about the future of your design tool? During last years, I had chance to hear lots of debates about that. One of the topics that requires attention is related to how we can increase intelligence of design tools to empower engineers towards getting better decisions. I can see multiple directions here – physical analysis, visualization, intelligence. Ability to add more tools and capabilities in hands of engineers and developers can be beneficial.
Product Planning and Social Analytics
Ability to analyze potential of the future product can be a powerful option. It can come in the context of different phases of product development. In the planning phases- to understand what is trending on the market, during advanced development phase – to see potential social communication related to future development, during the maintenance phase- do discover bugs and other customer issues.
What is my conclusion today? Social software provides an interesting area, since it touches the communication with existing and potential users. Users are the most important asset for any company. To be able to get more information about them can be an interesting opportunity for the future PLM and related development tools.
Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of OpenBOM developing a digital network platform that manages product data and connects manufacturers and their supply chain networks.
