It is not easy to add “social” to PLM

My recent post Social PLM: How to pull a trigger? became a trigger for me to think and discuss “social” topic again. I found certain level of disagreement with Jim Brown’s position about how to put social in PLM. Here is Jim’s comment:

@jim_techclarity: @olegshilovitsky There is a lot more low hanging fruit elsewhere. Easier to add social to PLM than PLM to social. Talk to you in 2019

I’m sure Facebook is not coming after PLM market. Getting back to my Facebook at Work post, my hunch is that Facebook is trying to crack the complexity of social behavior at work. And… this is not easy. And, therefore to add social to PLM is probably not easy too. We’ve seen so many established vendors and startup companies that tried to “add social” to CAD and PLM tools. Even to develop new tools.  So far, it ended up mostly with Facebook copycats and collaboration around comments in CAD models and drawings. Is it all about social at work? I stuck with the statement of “easier to add social to PLM”. I don’t see “social” as feature or add-on that you can add to existing tools or technologies. In my view, social is a reflection of people relationships, behaviors and fundamental needs. It took me more than few days to come with some thoughts about that and I wanted to share it with you.

I came back to one of my posts from the last year – Why Social PLM 1.0 Failed? My main conclusion back there was about value proposition of social tools. The fundamental interest of people in social tool was driven by variety of social behaviors. Facebook added true identity into social networking and it gave a spike in usage among people interested in other people activities, social status, relationships, photos, etc. LinkedIn helped to develop our professional identity and find beneficial connections for our carrier and business. Twitter gave us ability to follow variety of information stream in a very easy way.

Adding social into PLM, ERP and other enterprise tools means to improve communication. In my view, this is a place where all enterprise social tools have some sort of mixed achievements. Let me bring some examples to explain what I mean. I can see two fundamental communication patterns in a company – enterprise transaction system (ERP, PLM, CRM) and email.

1- Transactional communication. The main focus of this type of communication is about business processes. It is about adding new position in your organization using CRM tool, creating new Part Number in ERP system and approving ECO using PLM system. There are many other examples. But, in all these cases, people need to perform a transaction – this is a main purpose of their communication.

2- Email. Everything that doesn’t fit transactional communication goes into email. We have many complains about email overload. At the same time, we like email. It creates communication record, can prove what you did and in many situation serves a document. The ubiquity of email and mobility makes email a convenient tool to communicate.

Enterprise social tools are pretending to simplify communication and make information in the organization more transparent. It is true. I can see few situation where social tool can be successfully used by sales and marketing team to update company and synchronize about their activity. I also can see social collaboration as a good tool that can help to find an expert in a company based on previous records and projects. However, it doesn’t replace the fundamental capabilities and functions of email and, as a result, turns out to be another communication channel.

What is my conclusion? Similar to successful social networks, enterprise social tools need to find a single purpose for people to use it. Not as a vitamin, but as a painkiller. It is like a Facebook that gave you a way to watch people activities online. What is that function for enterprise organization? How it will be able to replace email or other tool? How it will make people to justify “another communication channel”? All these questions need to be answered. As a result we will invent “social tool for enterprise” that will become powerful as Facebook or LinkedIn. In my view, enterprise social tools and specifically engineering (PLM) social tools didn’t provide enough value to people to change their traditional communication…. yet. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

photo credit: Nimages DR via photopin cc