A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

Why Engineers Don’t Like Company Private Social Networks?

Why Engineers Don’t Like Company Private Social Networks?
Oleg
Oleg
22 July, 2012 | 2 min for reading

Couple of weeks ago, I discussed the potential of Yammer / Microsoft bundle to influence PLM field – Will Microsoft-Yammer kill Social PLM… Not yet. Actually, it seems to me Yammer indeed created some influence on what startups in PLM field are doing. Vuuch, last announcement introduces the ability to create company discussion groups.

In a nutshell, it looks exactly like Yammer idea. The employees of any company can register with their company emails and get an access to discussions inside of the same domain. Here is the link to a short video I found in the email from Vuuch:

Social PLM attempts

In my view, Vuuch is one of the leaders in trying to apply “social-networking” ideas in product development and enterprise. I can see similar attempts coming from large vendors too. The videos below show Dassault 3DSwYm and Windchill SocialLink experimenting with the idea of communities for product development.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cy74tKbp1Q

Can we ask engineers to behave in a social way?

When you speak about communities, the adoption is a key. Yammer claimed 5 million users and 85% of Fortune 500 companies are using Yammer. Here is the link on Yammer’s Crunch base profile :

With a Freemium model, Yammer enables employees to voluntarily adopt the service. A premium version is available to paying customers and includes additional administrative and security controls, integration with other applications, priority customer service, and a dedicated customer success manager. More than 5 million users, including employees from 85 percent of the Fortune 500, have adopted Yammer’s Software-as-a-Service solution.

I wasn’t able to find numbers related to user adoption of social PLM tools. Are you aware about successful implementation of private social communities in product development and manufacturing? I wanted to raise a provoking question – what is wrong with social PLM communities? Is it about not attractive content, user experience, absence of interest and/or need?

Recently, GrabCAD raised quite many splashes in the engineering space – 250,000 engineers, 45,000 CAD models and 3M downloads. However, GrabCAD is not in the business of private communities for product development. Taking into account their latest announcement, I have to say “not yet”. Another interesting example of community building is Local Motors – the place for people (engineers included) to create influencing vehicles together.

What is my conclusion? I think, PLM companies are missing some points in the space of social networking for enterprise. Here is my list of suspects – complicated user experience created by social PLM pioneers, anti-social engineering nature, engineer’s focus on “cool stuff” and ignorance of corporate oriented tools. These are just my guesses and thoughts… I’m interested in your opinion. Speak your mind…

Best, Oleg

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
13 January, 2018

One of my ‘burning questions” for PLM in 2018 is about value of data. Check my article (here). What PLM...

29 October, 2012

The interest to cloud PLM is growing these days. At the beginning of this year, I discussed future PLM business...

23 February, 2018

Innovation is truly a confusing buzzword. I kind of love to hate innovation. Every company on the earth agrees that...

8 June, 2010

Usually, when we are discussing various aspects of software, we are spending lot of time talking about technologies. However, I...

12 June, 2021

PLM is the system, technology, and process at the heart of your product development. It is a central control point...

28 February, 2017

For many years, single (or one) version of truth was a core principle of PLM data organization. It was a...

26 October, 2009

Do you know how companies are making decisions about their PLM related strategies? I don’t… Each time I see this...

6 April, 2016

Innovation and technology can make things cheaper. This is an interesting trend we are observing for the last few decades....

11 December, 2015

Onshape Inc made a next step in the development of cloud CAD system with the announcement of commercial release and...

Blogroll

To the top