What I Learned: Is Social Product Development Viable without PLM?

What I learned this week … came from
a post on PLM Think Tank (aka PLM Twine) titled
5 reasons why Wiki fails for PLM collaboration which I
think points to an interesting set of questions:

• Is social computing software enough on its own
  to support product innovation, product development, and
  engineering?
• Will social computing software evolve to
  handle more full PLM-related requirements as it matures?
• Will PLM leverage social computing platforms
  to extend their capabilities?
• Will PLM embed social computing
  capabilities of their own?

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This post caught my eye a while ago, but I didn’t have time to
respond (lots of excuses, including moving the office, I got the
flu, kids got the flu, the dog ate my blog, etc.). As it turns out,
time passing works out well because I have had the opportunity to
read some really interesting comments on Oleg’s post. Here is
my take on an interesting conversation, and some of my
thoughts on the direction that social computing in PLM might
take.

Note: In the title of this post I purposely not
using my normal name for this concept, which is “social computing
in PLM” because I think that begs the question. So I am using what
I believe will be the term adopted across the industry, which is
“Social Product Development.”

Relevant Past Discussion and Perspective
I have posted a number of times recently on the use of social
computing techniques to improve product innovation, product
development, and engineering performance. For some background,
please see my post on takeaways
from COFES on social networking in PLM.

Next Level Down Thinking - Technical
Approach
What I have been focused on has been the
business value of integrating social computing capabilities into
PLM solutions. Although I have a long technical background (anybody
else out there that has programmed in Fortran let me hear from you)
that is not my current role in our industry. I am convinced of the
business value that the mix of capabilities will bring, but I am
not close enough to the technologies to know how they will be
brought to life in individual companies or in the mass market. So
it was nice to see some next-level-down,
technical analysis of the topic. Oleg’s post drives
the question about wikis relatively deep, pointing out the five
reasons he sees them falling short (read the post, but in short
they are information access, content maintenance, updates,
integration, and structural information). At the risk of
trivializing something I haven’t explored in detail, I take
away two main things from Oleg’s comments:

• A wiki isn’t PLM grade because it falls short
  on advanced data management needs (including version
  control, associativity, or managing structured content like a bill
  of material)
• A wiki isn’t PLM grade because it lacks the ability to
  integrate (beyond a static URL)

The conversation that follows is enlightening, I was very
impressed with the quality of the respondents. I take two main
points away from the conversation (again, I suggest you
spend the time reading it yourself, my goal is to expand a bit and
point you to some good content that I learned from):

• Don’t count wikis short, there is work being
  done to make them enterprise class
• Don’t try to replace your PLM system with a
  wiki, they are not meant to replicate what PLM has evolved
  into over the last decade or so

Implications for Manufacturers?
Of the two things I am taking away from the post and the comments,
I want to focus on the last one - don’t try to replace you PLM
system with a wiki. My focus on using social computing
techniques in PLM isn’t to slap on existing tools and expect them
to do the full job. That would be like handing somebody a
relational database and an object-oriented programming
language and saying “here is your PLM system, it just needs a bit
of work.” OK, too extreme, but you get my point. What we should be
focusing on as an industry is how to leverage the concepts
of social computing to improve the things that PLM already
supports, but make them even better. Perhaps we employ
wikis to manage engineering rules/knowledge (PLM doesn’t do a great
job there from my experience), or maybe the value will come from
using social communities and reputation scoring to feed the front
end of innovation? Whatever it may be, I believe that there are
things that PLM alone doesn’t address, and there are certainly PLM
needs that social computing platforms fall very short on.

So that brings back my original question. Who will make
this happen? Will it be natural the evolution of social
networking platforms? Will it be custom development by
manufacturers that use both technologies? Will PLM integrate social
computing platforms? Or will PLM vendors build their own social
computing capabilities? The answer lies in the “next level down”
thinking that prompted this post, and similar thinking that is
going on in the software vendor community. In my opinion,
domain expertise always overrides technology
expertise. When new technologies have come along, it has
been people that understand the intersection of technology
with the business processes (in this case, the processes
of product innovation, product development, and engineering) that
lead the way. They are also the ones that are willing to focus on a
specific solution as opposed to a generalized technology that could
be applied to a broader market. To me, it will be
PLM-knowledgeable people leading the way. The bigger question is
where they will be working. Will they work for a forward-thinking
PLM vendor that builds these capabilities in? A social computing
giant that hires in experienced PLM talent? Or some upstart with a
PLM background that rethinks the whole thing from the ground up? If
I had the answer I would be a (retired, wealthy) investor instead
of an analyst, sorry. What I am confident in is that the
business value is real, and that if I was in the shoes of
any of those categories of vendors that is where I would be putting
my investment. But I am only an analyst, so I will sit by
and examine how it plays out. It’s tough to be on the
sidelines (or is the press box?) for this one.

So that is what I learned this week, I hope you found it
interesting. Let me know what you think. I apologize if I tried to
make up for the tardiness of replying to the post by writing a very
long post, I probably had to much time to think about it.