PLM One Big Silo

Silos is an interesting topic in enterprise software. And it is a very important topic for product lifecycle management. Why so? Because, PLM is heavily relies on the ability to work and communicated across the organization and extended value chain. Accessing information in multiple departments, functional domains and application is part of this story. Silos is clearly one of the biggest PLM challenges. At the same time, silos can be also a good thing. They are reflection of org structure and sort of order we can use to navigate inside of organization.

Engineering.com posted PLM/ERP article – “Demolish the silos in PLM”: Why Dassault’s Bernard Charles believes in the 3D Experience. Read the article and draw your opinion. My understanding – Dassault System is combine multiple technologies and product belonging to different organizational domains to improve communication and information access across silos in organization.

Dassault System is not alone in the try to crush silos. Article is referencing other PLM companies’ effort to interconnect people and products. I liked the following passage:

The main idea behind DS’ 3DExperience is to provide the IT tools needed to break down the silos and connect the development work not only to software, electronics and manufacturing, but also to the end-customers.  No doubt there are similarities and touch points between what this solution aims to do and Siemens PLM’s Industry 4.0 concept as well as PTC’s broader ALM, MES and SLM/IoT scope. The difference is that Siemens PLM places a higher priority on the engineering side of product realization, whereas PTC presently zooms in on the aftermarket and product-as-a-service concept. 

Interesting enough, web is also got infected with the problem of silos. Large web 2.0 platforms are very similar to enterprise software silos, which put a lot of questions about availability of information across the web. There are quite lot of debates these days around the topic of web openness and information access. I’ve been reading Aral Balkan’s article – How Web 2.0 killed the Internet. The article contains a lot of controversial opinions about development of Web 2.0 and the way Open API used to support the development of huge centralized systems such as Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter and some others.

The thing that made me think the most was the question about Openness and Open APIs. Here is the passage from the article.

An Open API is simply a limited, revokable license to access and consume a certain subset of data and/or functionality that belongs to a closed silo. It is a visitor’s pass. The terms of the pass grant you limited access for a specific time. The terms can be altered — and routinely are altered — at the whim of the API owner. This is a painful lesson that many developers learned, for example, while working to add value to the Twitter platform by building Twitter clients. They were unceremoniously dumped after expending their energies to help Twitter build up its closed silo.

These two articles made me think about demolishing organizational silos, enterprise software, and future trajectories of PLM development. The term silos is misleading. There are organizational silos and application silos. The first (organizational silos) is something that needs to be demolished to improve communication and process transparency. However, the second one (applications) is something that will be built-up to connect people, applications and data. So, there is a high probability to have PLM One Big Silo built to solve the problem of communication and streamlining of product development.

The thing that raises my concern are related to open API. Enterprise software companies might have different reasons to product data compared to Google, Facebook and Twitter. However, fundamentally these APIs are controllable by vendors that can turn them off and on depends on the strategy, competition and many other reasons.

What is my conclusion? To build an open system is a very complicated task. I can see a shift towards creating of huge monolithic vertical silos. So, PLM One Big Silo is a very possible future for customers looking for smoothly integrated systems and aligned experience. However, my belief is that future will belong to open systems, which will bring an additional level of innovation and flexibility. Long term commitment of vendors for Open API is an important indication of software trajectory. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg