PLM Communism and PLM Enterprise Future

Have you heard about BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) trend? Together with some other “consumerization” trends it shows the power of web, social and other technologies developed for consumer space. It is really different from the situation 15-20 years. Back that days new technologies were first developed in the “closed” spaces like army, defense, spaceship programs. Nowadays, life is different. New technologies are coming from web giants like Google, Facebook and others.

Another interesting aspect of consumerization is related to people behavior. Gen-Y is coming with a different perception about everything and especially related on how software should be done. I called it “consumer behavior”.

Does it mean revolution? Kind of… Few days ago, the article in CIO magazine caught my attention – BYOD Drives Communism Out of IT. The article mostly speaks how BYOD trend is going to disrupt the ability of IT to control everything in the organization and provide some additional flexibility to users.  You can say, BYOD is about hardware. Actually, it is not. This is also related to the freedom of choice when it comes to your working environment. Here is my favorite passage about that:

And consumerization of IT—the addition of choice to the enterprise environment—is not just a hardware issue. Employees and even whole divisions can now turn to the cloud to make an end-run around IT if they believe they are not getting the tools they need or want from IT… “I don’t have to go buy servers; I don’t have to go buy people,” says David Nichols, leader of the CIO Services Group at Ernst & Young. “I can go to a cloud service provider, and I can do it completely without you. I can go buy people or a server or a data center that can produce what I need quicker than IT can give it to me.”

I think, we see some signs of anti-Communist-IT revolution is going now around us. It brings more applications that can run your mobile devices. However, one of the most important changes is the ability to use cloud technologies to deploy and implement everything much faster and… without IT. I can see also challenges here. Most of PDM/PLM systems are collaborative by nature. So, it is different than single app user decides to use. However, I can see it also as an opportunity. Once you won single user, it will promote the app of his choice to other users.

What is my conclusion? It sounds like a challenging time at IT disrupted by the power of new trends. Will it influence CAD/PLM community and vendors? Yes, it does already. To end users it means more choice. PLM companies need to see how to leverage these trends to their advantages in order not to miss future users. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg