What I Learned: Why Social Networking in PLM is a (Really) Bad Idea

What I learned this week … came from
an unexpected source - an April Fool’s Day joke. Maybe some of
you have seen it, it was an excellent prank
video by SpaceClaim
showing the new Twitter add-in for their CAD solution.
First,
I applaud it for being truly creative and funny. Second, I think it
points out a very important point. Social networking tools
like Twitter, if implemented without a strategy and a vision for
how it will help the business, is a bad idea and could be a very
troublesome nuisance. I believe to define how social
computing will work to improve business, we also need to understand
what won’t work.

Overview
Social computing shows a lot of promise to help
manufacturers improve collaboration and discover new
product information and IP to improve product innovation,
product development, and engineering performance. I firmly believe
these capabilities will be embedded in all enterprise-class PLM
solutions (in fact, all leading enterprise applications) over the
next five years. Today, the vendor, analyst, and manufacturing
communities are trying to determine where the greatest potential
value can be gained by applying these tools. As people are
developing their lists of what it could do, I have run into some
brilliant and some (I hate to say stupid, but I will come close
here) really bad ideas. I know there aren’t supposed to
be any stupid ideas in brainstorming, so feel free to come up with
your own politically correct term. The point is, I have
seen too many people taking the technology-centric approach to
determining how to apply the tools. I have heard
people talk about how companies could use the capabilities without
an business context at all, or with business ideas that don’t match
reality. What I am hoping to see is people focusing on what
companies should do with the technology in order to solve the
inherent challenges in product development today (time to market,
complexity, mechatronics, global design, etc.). And more
importantly, to explore and understand where the business
value will come from by using these tools. In short, the
focus should be on how will social computing drive higher levels of
product profitability, not how can we use these tools.

Some Bad Ideas IMHO (in my humble
opinion)
We are in the early phases of applying these
capabilities to improve business performance in product
development, and I believe there is a lot of need to examine the
business case and ROI for social computing in PLM. But let’s start
with how these tools can destroy or distract value
by sharing some (in my opinion) bad examples.

• The Real-time Myth - Engineers do need
  information in real-time. They might need to check on status, get
  some input, or find a piece of data that they need to move forward.
  But they also need time to work on their designs. Engineering takes
  concentration which can’t come in 5-minute intervals. Kudos to
  SpaceClaim for their demonstration on how this could
  happen. Engineers and designers can’t be at the beckon call of
  anybody that needs a piece of information, or their “Distraction
  Ratio” of nonproductive vs. productive time will force them to
  design at night or on weekends when the noise turns off. Companies
  still need to have solid data management approaches to make
  information easily retrievable, and other forms of communication
  that are not instantaneous such as e-mail, threaded discussion, or
  other means. In the hyper-connected world, engineers will
  need to have the ability to turn off the real-time access with the
  virtual equivalent of shutting their door. Of course, most
  cubicles these days don’t have doors anyway…

• The “Voice of Customer” Myth - One
  other idea that has a lot of good intentions and strong
  ideological merit is for engineers to getting input from customers
  on their designs. This is absolutely a good intent. But is social
  media that right way for engineers to get this information? And as
  above, can they incorporate it real-time? Social networking can
  provide great avenues for customers to share information with the
  company. But it shouldn’t be used as an excuse for poor
  requirements and product planning. Techniques such as
  crowdsourcing require more than just signing your engineers up
  for Twitter. This is an area where these tools can extend
  to product management and marketing resources to improve
  processes currently accomplished through focus groups and other
  techniques. So “VOC” is great, but an engineer probably
  shouldn’t be listening to a constant stream of customer
  noise as opposed to gaining visibility to a better set of
  requirements. Don’t get me wrong, I think that engineers
  interacting directly with the customer is invaluable, I used to
  encourage that with the software engineers I worked with. But too
  much input is probably noise at best, and more likely
  disruption.

Those are a couple of my favorite bad ideas. I am sure you have
heard more, and with apologies I am sure I will come up with some
of my own as well. Feel free to share them here.

Implications for Manufacturers?
Do not apply
the technology because you can, apply the technology
because you can solve a problem and increase profitability.
This is a perfect example of a technology that can do
anything, but without the right business strategy will do nothing
(or worse, do harm). Understand where you have
inefficiencies or problems in your processes, and then consider
social networking and social computing capabilities as a way to
address them. Do not implement the technology for technology’s
sake.

The second message I hope manufacturers take away is that
social networking is an addition to a solid PLM strategy,
not a replacement. Without managed data, projects, and
processes as an underpinning then social networking might just make
a chaotic environment frantically
chaotic.

So that is what I learned this week, I hope you found it
interesting. Let me know what you think.