I want continue the conversation about the intersection of social software and PLM. Yesterday blog Why Social PLM 1.0 failed? made me think about how to find a single utility for user in that context. As Jim Brown mentioned in his comment earlier, the social hype calmed down and PLM eco-system didn’t change overnight. All together it brings me to the point of finding additional value-add services.
The following blog post caught my attention – 5 Fun Ways to Travel Back in Time with Your Social Data. The article speaks about tools helping us to discover, analyze and get back in history of our social channels – LinkedIn, Twitter, Facbook, etc. One of the tools – Vizify drove my special interest. The application with a very easy user interface helped me to get access and analyze my twitter behavior as well as connection to photo, linkedin and facebook. Take a look on few screen shots I’ve made. You can also see the results by navigating to this link.
I found an interesting intersection between social, timeline and big data. PLM lifecycle function is somewhat that can be improved by a similar experience. To have the ability to access product historical data, making analyzes and merge information can be extremely interesting. Think about the ability to merge product releases with customer social stream and defect database. I can bring more examples. The utility was able to analyze my data fast, easy and without heavy IT involvement. I understand that getting access to public services like Twitter and Facebook is easier than to your corporate ERP system. At the same time the trend towards simplification and added value cloud services is clear to me.
What is my conclusion? In my view, Social PLM 1.0 was completely focused on how to create and collaborate. To me it was an obvious attempt – collaborative design and engineering was always a focus of CAD/PLM vendors . However, think about single user utility and the value of additional services. Social timeline (or lifecycle timeline in the context of PLM) can be an interested feature and value added utility. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
