COFES 2010, Maieutic Parataxis and PLM Excels

I hope you know about my “love and hate” relationships with Excel. I posted many times about how deep Excel integrated into current CAD/PDM/PLM software life. Think about that, for the moment. You are getting Bill of Materials and Design Tables in CAD using Excel, lots of reports, catalogs and other data. There are lots of other reasons too. Just as an example you can take a look on one of my old “Excel” posts – Why Do I like My PLM Excel Spreadsheets?

About few months ago, I found an interesting Microsoft Live Lab product called “Pivot“. I posted about that. You can see my original post via this link. My initial thoughts were about how to try this pivot functionality on the real PLM data to see what is possible to achieve. Fortunately, this blog post got into attention of Simon Floyd from Microsoft, and he made this experiment. Last week at COFES 2010 during Maieutic Parataxis session, Simon presented his experiments. Full presentation from Maieutic Parataxis session will be available later this link. However, you can see some of the slides below.

I think, Pivot concept is an interesting experiment. Excel paradigm is very popular. At the same time, customer demands towards simple and clean user interfaces in PDM/PLM systems are very strong. Pivot can put lights on some potential in more deep exploration of Excel capabilities. Some of the visual representations in Pivot are similar to existing PLM products. Filtering and pivoting functionality is strong and interesting. To get information into Pivot can be challenging in my view.

What is my conclusion? PLM Pivot experiment requires attentions. Usability in PLM systems is a hard problem.Despite all claims mainstream customers are dissatisfied.  I’m very interesting to hear what do you think about this example? As usual, I’m looking forward to your comments.

Best, Oleg