Facebook At Work and Designing Airplanes

We are not Going to Design an Airplane on Facebook! Jim Brown of Tech-Clarity said it on his blog back in 2009. That was the era of early debates about PLM and social software. Navigate here to read the historical blog and COFES 2009 debates. You can find audio-recording of these debates on COFES web site.

What I learned this week … came from a participant at my session on Social Computing in PLM at COFES last month. A quote from the session has been haunting me since that time, and I haven’t been able to place my finger on why it has resonated in my head. I think because it is both meaningful to me and meaningless at the same time. The quote was “We are not going to desgin an airplane on Facebook!” The statement drew a lot of chuckles, and I have to believe it’s a true statement of fact. But I think why it haunts me is that people are willing to discount the value of a hugely important trend (the use of social computing technologies in business) because the examples they have don’t quite fit the way the currently work.

Fast forward into 2016.  Although we are still not designing airplanes on Facebook, the things have changed a lot. After almost two years of experiments, Facebook is coming with Facebook At Work next month. Navigate to the following Techcrunch article to read more. My favorite passage speaks about how Facebook will be able to prove value delivery:

Facebook At Work’s biggest strength could be its familiarity. It should find onboarding users easier than many SaaS tools since people will already have a login, password, and know how to use it. That quick registration could help it leapfrog competitors that can often seem foreign or confusing compared to consumer software. If a customer prefers it for security purposes, employees can also set up entirely separate accounts for business. The launch will come just as Microsoft scraps the Yammer Enterprise tier many companies rely on, who might be looking for a new way to keep the whole team on the same page.

Another interesting article- Why Facebook at Work is a new Deal for Enterprise World by Dany Vilela Agostinho brings an interesting perspective on Facebook At Work features.

I’m not sure how fast companies will jump to use all features outlined in the picture above. After all, inertia is a big deal for enterprise organizations.

At the same time, my hunch is that Facebook has a good chance to bring people on the same page. The familiarity of the environment can play an important role here. Especially when it comes to engineering collaboration. I can see, engineering people, are bad organized. In many situations to run processes among engineers is similar to herding cats. To manage process in an engineering organization is a challenge. This is a place where PLM vendors usually fails to provide a reliable and simple solution. Engineers are asking for additional flexibility and vendors have a tendencies to provide a complicated solutions. Many PLM tools are providing sort of Workflow designer to create a process model. Later on, you can discover that engineers tend to abandon these processes. Main reason – these processes are not reflecting the reality. This is a place where Facebook At Work can provide something nobody can do today.

What is my conclusion? Some of questions asked by Jim Brown back 2009 are not obvious to answer as it was before. I’m sure the questions about security, IP protection and collaboration can be addressed differently today. Facebook still has nothing to do with engineering data, CAD files, etc. But with growing interest in building hardware, Facebook actually can figure out how to view 3D files in Facebook environment.  Also, some new vendors in engineering software domain might consider bundle with Facebook as an interesting opportunity to reach a broader group of potential users. So, we might see a growing number of partners from engineering world. The issue of the trust is one of the most complicated. It will raise bunch of tough questions. The jury is out. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of openBoM developing cloud based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups and supply chain. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.