What is the future of PLM research?

I’m in Moscow these days to attend the first Autodesk University Russia (AU.Ru). Even so, I feel like attending multiple conferences at the same time. During the last two days, I was following the twitter discussion about CIMdata PLM Roadmap 2012 in Michigan, USA as well as reading about Bricsys conference in Amsterdam. The amount of information online stroke me to think about how easy industry information became available and how simple to maintain a conversation with your peers – bloggers, analysts and vendors on multiple continents in different time zones. This made me think about significant changes that happens in industry research community because of internet, social media and blogs. Just to clarify, I’m not speaking about dueling analysts Jim Brown and Chad Jakson trying to win the write to brush the teeth with wasabi paste. My point is that the role of industry research is getting different.

One of the articles I read few days ago, came to my mind. Navigate to the following link to read the article – Will Market Research Still Exist in 20 years? by Ben Leet. The topic is interesting. I found the following passage notable to present key changes that happen in market and industry research:

I argue therefore, that market research simply for capturing quantitative data will be long dead 20 years from now, since there will be no need for this technique when the data will already exist in cheaper and more accessible forms. I even question the future role of data analytics, as predictive algorithms will become so advanced that human intervention will rarely be needed, because data confidence levels will be well within acceptability.

Remember 10-15 years ago, market research was mostly about having an access to the data. Now it is different. Today, everybody can have an access to the data. The question now is more about what outcome you can drive from the data. It is also interesting to see how it changes the landscape of larger and smaller analytical and market research firms.

What is my conclusion? We don’t need industry and market research firms to help us to get access to the information. Now data is available. So, to have access nowadays is not a privilege of marketing research companies. Google and other social software changed our ability to communicate. Research is moving from information access to information analysis and building predictive models of the future based on social data. It requires new skills and new people. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Image courtesy of Greenbookblog.