Don’t you think enterprise software and PLM are boring stuff? I certainly agree. Take a look for all CAD, Simulation, 3D Printing and other goodies. It all looks very cool. When I’m attending trade shows and other live events, these booths usually drive most attention. Data management, PDM, PLM stuff is boring. Who wants to talk about check-in, check-out, release, workflows, processes, etc. Engineers are relying on IT and managers? On the other side, managers and IT are not interested and hope engineers will do their jobs anyway. Engineers and designers are doing cool stuff. Most of them hardly believe PDM/PLM is something they really need.
My good friends and blogging buddies Jim Brown and Chad Jackson decided to bring some controversy into PDM/PLM conversation. So they started Tech4PD show. Navigate to this link to read more about it. Here is the important passage about what is Tech4PD:
Seriously though, there are a lot of outstanding issues related to technology in product development. There are lots of executives and users out there trying to make the right decision with respect to technology, but its a very confusing place right now. We believe that the most valid points regarding a topic are the ones that stand up to scrutiny.
And here is a first episode of Tech4PD about granularity and integration.
PLM edutainment?
Edutaining is a term that was coined back in 1948 by Walt Disney Corporation. Since then it used by many organizations to present various topics such as health and teenager education. Navigate to Wikipedia link to read more. Here is the definition:
Educational entertainment is any entertainment content that is designed to educate as well as to amuse. Content with a high degree of both educational and entertainment value is known as edutainment. There also exists content that is primarily educational but has incidental entertainment value. Finally, there is content that is mostly entertaining but can be seen to have some educational value.
I can see a growing interest of software vendors in this topic. If you follow approaches like “for dummies”, “in plain english” and some others, you can see some similarity here. There are lots of innovations in this place, and I’m sure we are going to see more.
What is my conclusion? Engineers like cool stuff and reject everything that bore them. In many cases, I see executives’ behavior similar to kids (seriously :)). So, we need to innovate in how to bring a message to both communities. Tech4PD edutaining approach makes sense to me. I don’t know how many people will immediately join the conversation about granularity and integration. However, I will come for sure to see how Jim (or Chad) will brush their teeth with wasabi paste. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
