Communication and collaboration is an important part of every PLM solutions. To maintain an efficient way to communicate is not less important than the ability to manage CAD or BOM data. At the same time, email still remains the main system to run communication in every company and extended enterprise communication between OEM, suppliers and other parties. For the last decade or even more, the answer of PLM vendors on email challenge was to create an integration of PLM-process communication into Lotus, Outlook and similar email systems.
Recently, social collaboration became another way vendors are using to shake a status quo of communication problems and collaboration challenges. I’ve been observing modern trends and interesting cases around improvements that can be done in communication. Navigate to one of my previous posts – DIY PLM and zero email policy to read about trends in social networking and collaboration. Another interesting use case was the way Google email support integration of other systems for actionable input – PLM Workflow and Google actionable emails.
Here is a new thing I captured. Have you heard about growing popularity of Messaging applications? We can see new entrants (WeChat, WhatsApp) as well as establishing vendors play (Facebook, Skype, Twitter). Pay attention on the following slide deck – Messenger Wars: How Facebook lost its lead. In my view, it brings some interesting information and statistics about growing dominance of specialized messaging applications. If you don’t have time, take a look below – I put few slides that caught my special attention below:
Messaging Apps winning over Facebook made me think about how dominance of one application can be challenged. I can see a potential opportunity to come and change a communication status of email in the company. Messaging apps are proposed address book and social graph integration. PLM messaging apps can suggest a better content and enterprise identity interaction in the organization.
What is my conclusion? I can see clear demand to make communication and collaboration more efficient. Consumerization and BYOD trends are introducing new challenges in front of PLM vendors. This is especially for new generation of users – digital natives. I think, some innovation can happen at this place. Email integration proposed by all PLM vendors is “so ’95“. I can see Messaging apps as a good example how to propose a new way to communicate and challenge existing ways to collaborate and run processes. The key elements are content integration and communication on multiple devices can provide clear differentiation compared to existing solutions. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
