The world around us is changing much faster these days. It happens in many places. Business environment are much more dynamic. New technologies are disrupting existing industries and eco-systems. PLM systems were developed to help companies to manage and follow product development processes in the companies and extended eco-system. As businesses are going through the changes, we can see a need to change the way product development processes are organized. The question I want to ask is how it will impact and change PDM/PLM development.
Originally, PDM/PLM systems were build to bring an order in a chaotic world of technical and engineering data. You probably remember the early acronyms used for these purposes – EDM/TDM. For many years, the fundamental proposition of PDM/PLM systems was to organize a centralized data storage and to define rules to store and manage data. It certainly helps in many sense to companies to move from chaos to order. However, with all modern changes in business ecosystem, it gets harder to get to the final state of the PDM/PLM implementations. These implementations are unsustainable in front of frequency of changes.
I’ve been listening to Jon Hirschtick earlier this week at COFES 2013. Jon was talking about changes in the culture of programming tools. Programming and product development methods and technologies are going through lots of changes these days.
One of the analogies Jon made resonated. Jazz product development model. I found it funny and true at the same time. To go from from closed world of controlled development systems to open source and with community of developers replacing manuals. This is a very interesting change – community and development eco system can provide much high level of agility.
It made me think about different approaches in development of PDM/PLM systems. What is the potential to use agile product development methods, open source eco-system and the power of communities.
What is my conclusion? The changes are coming. Internet and open source helped to develop a different eco system. This system is completely different from what we know many years in PDM and PLM. I’m curious if and how the new model will influence the development of enterprise software. I think vendors need to take a note. Openness, flexibility and agile methods are trending. These are important and irreversible trends, in my view. Some companies will lose the connection with the reality and disappear. However, the smart ones will evolve. These are just my thoughts. What is your take? Speak up…
Best, Oleg
