One-to-One: PTC Getting Serious about Social Product Development

I had the chance to talk with … the
team at PTC about the new
information they
added to their website on “Social Product Development“. The
site is set up as a blog, but also contains video and some helpful
downloads aimed at
helping people understand the use of social computing in product
development. This is the first major public step they have made in
this area since I spoke with PTC earlier in the year about how

PTC and Microsoft Get Social with Product Developers, and it is
nice to see them making progress. I also had a chance to get a
sneak preview of some of the things they are doing in their
products to turn the vision into reality for their customers, they
have certainly been hard at work.

What do they Offer?
PTC is one of the
largest PLM Suite Providers on the market. PTC has a broad
vision for PLM, offering what they call their “Product Development
System.” As a vendor, they have focused on helping
companies design and develop products more efficiently and
more effectively. PTC has focused on core engineering
functions, but has also spread into new areas in PLM by buying
Synapsis for product compliance and acquiring Arbortext for
product documentation. PTC is PLM - with a strong focus on
engineering and product development.

With that background, PTC is now taking a strong stance on
enabling their product development system with social
computing capabilities. Social computing in product
development, which they call “Social Product Development,” is an
important initiative for PTC. In their
first blog entry on the new site (worth a look just for the
cartoon) PTC’s Robin Saitz discusses the role of social
computing capabilities in supporting collaboration and product
innovation. I think this is an important aspect of social computing
in PLM, and as I wrote in How
Does Social Computing in PLM Help Collaboration? I believe
this is one of the most likely near-term benefits that
manufacturers will gain from social computing in PLM. I believe
there is more there too, as you will see in Why
Social Networking in PLM is More than Just Collaboration. Of
course I wrote the posts in the reverse order, I guess that’s how
my mind works sometimes.

How does this Fit into the Ecosystem?
I believe that social computing in PLM is both valuable and
inevitable. Product innovation, product development, and
engineering are inherently social activities. Well known best
practices (backed up by research such as my benchmarks from my time
with Aberdeen) include multi-disciplinary teams and extending
product development into the supply chain. For more on this topic,
see Social
Networks - Productivity Boom or Bust for NPD. Given the
continued virtualization and globalization of product development
teams (and companies themselves for that matter), social
networking will be required just to compensate for dispersed
teams, and retain effective engineering. But I think
the potential is much greater, particularly as companies like PTC
adopt this into the core of their solutions and then look for ways
to expand the capabilities even further. More on potential futures
in another post. 

Five to ten years from now, social computing in PLM will be
commonplace. In fact, I believe it will be commonplace in
most enterprise applications. This is the next step in how
computers and people work together productively. I liken this to
workflow systems breaking onto the scenes in the 1990’s. At first,
it was the forward-looking companies and software vendors that “got
it” and started incorporating and automating business process
management directly in the software. Now, giving life to business
processes is a core value in PLM and other systems. Down the road,
social computing will almost certainly be a standard part
of all enterprise software infrastructure. Today,
vendors like PTC that see the value of social computing in
enterprise software are just ahead of the curve.

So that’s what I hear from PTC, I hope you found it useful. What
do you think? What else should I have asked them? Or you can ask
them yourselves now that they have an open line of communication in
their blog on this topic.