One of my favorite keynotes last week at COFES 2014 took me to the definition of time paradox and how different time orientation can reflect personal happiness. People are usually in one of the three time phases orientation – past, present or future. It appears that such presence phases have influence on lots of aspects of people’s behavior. If you never heard about this (like me until last week), the following video by Philip Zimbardo – The psychology of time is a very good starting point to learn about it. I’m looking forward to read Time Paradox book coming weekend.
COFES keynote time paradox made talks me think that time phase orientation can be applied organizational behavior as well as vendor-customer relationships. The realization that PLM vendor and PLM customer may be seeing the world very differently is important. Evermore, it can lead to understanding of how to improve that behavior and “customer happiness”.
In my view most of PLM vendors as well as technological providers are future phase, which makes a lot of sense. From that standpoint, I can see PLM is standing out, especially when it comes to SME organization. For many of them, technologies are mostly meaningless. To think about process improvement? Meh… What is important is to get job done and deliver orders. Which made me think about customers are in present phase. It come with risk management, cost optimization, interest to protect current job and current business status, etc.
It is very hard (almost impossible) to change people. It will take long time to make customer re-think how to perceive future tech investment. At the same time, vendors need to learn how to become more present oriented and turn PLM solutions that can bring short term practical benefits without significant investment from their side.
What is my conclusion? Customers are demonstrating high level of resilience against technological changes. For most cases, they see it as a disturbance. Vendors need to find a way to show more customer-orientation – it will help to bridge between future and present time orientation and move implementation focus into present time. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
