First PLM Lessons From Google Buzz

February 10, 2010

Google introduced a new product yesterday – Google Buzz. It is still very new, but I think, the message is clear. Google finally decided to step into massive social place allocated today by multiple social nets and communication tools. It is too early to say how Google Buzz will evolve in the open internet space. It is even harder to predict how Google Buzz will impact enterprise space. However, during the event, Google mentioned that they will roll out Google Buzz also to enterprise apps and will make it available inside of Google apps.

I’m sure, at the time you’ll read my post Google Buzz will be already available on your accounts. So, the simplest way, click on this link and try this out. You can watch some videos too. The following one is short and nice. I liked it.

However, I wanted to share with you some of my impressions and first “PLM lessons” from Google Buzz.

Communicate Easy
The same lesson repeatedly. People’s collaboration is all around their emails. When you try to create multiple streams by adding a new collaboration tool, you are in real danger to create frustration. Since, people are following emails much easier than other messaging systems Google decided to bring Buzz to the Gmail. I think, PLM made an enormous effort by trying to shift people’s way to collaboration from the email. Not sure this is the right thing to do.

Connect to Existing Processes
This is sort of continuation of the email story. How people can find right peers to work with? Buzz came with the simple idea – just ramp up on top of gmail accounts as a social net. Later, you can improve. PLM put huge effort on how to establish right processes and how to model processes in the organization. However, I think the missing point was about how to connect to existing processes in the organization. Since, in most of the cases, PLM comes to the existing company, they have processes set in place. To capture them is probably the most important thing to do.

Remove Walls
You can see how easy Google Buzz connects to the environment -web, pictures, twitter… What they are trying to do is to remove walls and artificial barriers in the organization. I think, this is the important lesson, PLM needs to learn. When I’m hearing voices like “who is more strategic in the organization?”, I can see huge barriers built around. Is it the right way to work in open social place?

I think, Google Buzz has a long way to go. However, this is a very interesting experience and lots of lessons to learn from how Google Buzz will be competing with existing social network giants – facebook and twitter. I will try to focus more on potential of Google Buzz in enterprise space and specifically related to PLM.

What is your opinion? Have you made your first Google Buzz steps?
Best, Oleg

PS. It is obvious to say, but Daily PLM Think Tank is coming to Google Buzz too. I will see you buzzing there :) …

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Posted by olegshilovitsky

Is Google Docs A Good Place To Store CAD Files?

January 15, 2010

I was reading Google Enterprise Blog - Store and share files in the cloud… My hunch is that PLM eco-system needs to be prepared in potential leak of users going to collaborate via Google accounts. So, I decided to put my pros and cons for this scenario.

The pros of this scenario are obvious to me. The store is online, access is in everyplace. You don’t have to think about devices, backups, USB drives, etc .. However, CAD-related environment is not there (yet). To see a potential, you can take a look on Google 3D Warehouse.

What is potential cons. Size is one of them. At the time when the cost of external hard drives is going sharp down, cost of online storage can definitely a question. The second (and first asked everytime you speak about online) is security. However, it will depend on the type of customers. I do believe, initial adoption will be going bottom up and smaller customers will less care about the security topic. The missing piece in Google App chain is a solution for viewing of CAD files. The question if some of Viewing Solutions, available on the market, can be adopted to Google App? This can be a very interesting turn.

What is my conclusion today? The interest for online storage for collaboration and data sharing will grow. Based on good consumer experience with online services, customers will start to ask questions about how to adopt similar practices in the companies. What is your view on that? Will you be interested in the cloud based collaborative apps?

Best, Oleg

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Posted by olegshilovitsky

Collaboration Trends or Why I Stopped Using Google Wave?

January 11, 2010

We tend to use word “collaboration” very often in Product Lifecycle Management and related fields. Collaborative Design, Collaboration Product Data Management, Collaborative… I want to discuss how I see the world of collaboration can probably change in the future. The following four trends are my take on what will happen in the area of collaboration.

1. Infrastructure maturing. This is obvious and not. In my view, the biggest collaborative infrastructure move for the last few years was introducing of “Unified Collaboration”. However, I think, this trend will continue and Cisco, Microsoft and others will provide more and more infrastructure solutions for the market.

2. Device-less. Collaboration will need to lose religious connection to the specific device. Growing cloud computing and improvements in the multiple device will disconnect collaboration from the “collaborative device”. We will collaborate using mobile phone, PDA, Tablet, via Internet, on multiple devices in your office.

3. Going beyond applications. The context will become The King Of Collaboration. However, you need to have rich set of information in your hands in order to set up context for collaboration. Such set of information in PLM can come only from multiple applications – requirements, analyzes, design, manufacturing planning, etc. Collaborative tools will need to go beyond a specific application to be really useful in the future.

4. Collaboration – not social. I think the name for “social” inside of organization is “collaboration”. It will take some time to understand it, but this is really true. In place of social networks, friends, connections, etc. will come organizational structures and collaborative work. However, lots of social nets practices will be adopted for new collaborative organizations.

5. Growth in enterprise search. I think, enterprise search will need to learn from success of web search. Today is still not happening. However, as much as organizations produce more and more data, search will become an important function. Today search is the commodity and very primitive in organization and new collaborative application will have to change it.

Now, how it related to Google Wave? The Alpha preview of Google Wave was announced last year on I/O conference and got a lot of visibility, discussions and speculation. It was the fist time, after introducing of Google Mail, people have tried to get Google Wave invitation even for money. Few month later after initial I/O demo, Google released about 100’000+ invitation and, in my view, satisfied the need of researching communities. Now, the ugly truth is that despite huge expectations related to how Google Wave can improve and change people collaboration, for the moment, it doesn’t happen.

What are top failures of Google Wave, for the moment?

1. Isolation. Google Wave is terrible connected to the outside world. The technological promise is in place, but practically it still not happened in beta/alpha versions. It will take time to develop all connections that allow GW to become part of your day-to-day work.

2. Another application to run. This is related to previous point. But, today, you need to run it, follow this application, etc. This is like another mail. Somewhat you need to spend more time to work on…

3. Documents and other Google App integration. This is a place where Google needs to learn from Microsoft, in my view. Microsoft’s folks did a great job integrating SharePoint and Office Apps. Google Wave need to do the same with Google Apps. This will be part of their mutual success.

4. Inbox management. This is similar to mail inbox. And need to be improved. I still don’t know how, but feels like we cannot drag old email inbox problems into new collaborative world :) .. This is a place to innovate.

So, what is my conclusion today? I think we will see growing interest in collaborative platforms and application in coming couple of years. However, organization will hardly accept “yet another application to collaborate”. The platform trend will be very strong and will require certain integration and “collaboration” inside of organization. The ideas of social networks, enterprise 2.0 will be proliferating in the organization and mature in the way of open collaborative platforms.

Just my thoughts.
Best, Oleg

15 Comments | Collaboration, Daily PLM Think Tank, Enterprise 2.0, Future Trends | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky

Vuuch, Social PLM and Google Wave Evaluation…

January 5, 2010

Last year I had chance to talk about social aspects of PLM with Chris Williams from Vuuch.com. Moving enterprise software into the “social” direction is a very interesting aspect. The main change I see in this approach is that element of people communication becomes a main driver force for system to be used. This is an important element of the system adoption. I had chance to see many enterprise systems, implementing complex models, optimized processes, dashboards, etc .. However, all these systems were abused by users next day after implementation and introduction in the production environment.

The idea of social PLM is to build system on top of people’s communication models. I see a very interesting element of Vuuch is an attempt to build system on top of the most popular communication model – email. I don’t know about you, but I love and hate mail at the same time. Mail is dumb, simple and messy together. However, in the end, it is simple, available and works. Vuuch is trying to introduce the system that helps designers to communicate and collaborate by improving existing mail collaboration models. It brings specific product connections (i.e SolidWorks, Office tools) to the mail communication model and by doing so, it makes your collaboration more intelligent. This is a very interesting approach, and I want to see what will be people adoption for such a communication model in the future.

But, you can ask me how Google Wave is related to this conversation? Google Wave was a significant event last year and Google’s attempt to re-define email communication. You can refer to my posts last year to get more details (i.e. 6 Reasons Why Google Wave Will Change PLM Collaboration). I got my long awaited Google Wave invitation last year and started my Google Wave journey. I have to say that my reaction after 1-2 month of work was “love and hate”. I love it, since it introduced some interesting models merging IM (instant messenger) and mail together. The technological foundation and ability to collaborate at the same time are fascinating. However, on the practical side, I’m getting back to my mail for the moment. The most significant advantage for Outlook users is the message threading, but you can have this feature in gmail as well as in other mail systems (like Apple and some others). Other capabilities of Google Wave are still in very premature state and need to be developed to connect Google Wave as a collaboration foundation to the end-user tasks. This is a point of time I thought about Vuuch – combination of collaboration foundation with connection to the specific end user systems and function can be the key to the social PLM adoption.

What is my conclusion today? Social elements in enterprise software will continue to materialize and grow in my view. The examples will come from both sides – bottom up from vendors like Google and Microsoft in their try to redefine infrastructure and horizontal systems and top-down, from small companies like Vuuch trying to present specific social collaborative cases in vertical application domains.

Best, Oleg

PS. I will be watching this space. I’m going to see Vuuch demo next week on the Mass Innovation Nights event.

8 Comments | Collaboration, Daily PLM Think Tank, Google, Social Media and Tools | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky

Google Wave PLM Use Cases

November 25, 2009

The Google Wave invites pushed to the community for the last 1-2 months are starting to bring some fruitful results. The number of pilots, prototype, demos and other activities related to Google Wave started to growth. I already posted on very interesting, in my view, business process building collaboration tool from SAP. In addition, you can see few more examples of Google Wave in “almost real life” here.

Looking on all these examples I wanted to figure out few possible PLM related scenarios that in my view can get real benefits from using Google Wave.

1. ECO Collaboration. It will be great to have an ability to mix formal process and not formal collaboration around planned or requested change. Most of the today systems implement a formal process that allows to run change approval. The level of flexibility can vary to depend on the system you have, but in my view, none of them can provide an ability to merge of a free mail collaboration and at the same time host formal control on ECO process definition and status. I think, potential of Google Wave robots can unlock and provide such capability to engineering and manufacturing teams.

2. Collaborative Documentation Release. To have high level quality of your product is very important these days. However, to organize efficient collaboration between engineering, manufacturing and documentation team is a not simple effort. They usually have different tools and communicate in a very weak manner. Google Wave can be a collaborative tool that bridge them and allow to have a documentation effort started very early in the process of product development. 3D and non-3D documentation can be embedded into Waves and provide up-to-date information to document writes. This information can be updated and documentation writes can collaborate with people they need in other organizations.

3. Design Discussion and Brainstorming. Design activities can be hardly formalized. Many people in the organization can be involved into this activity almost on demand. At the same time, conferencing and other collaboration tools are not allowing to engineers do it in the asynchronous way. Google Wave can help. Mixing discussion threads and 3D information in Waves we’ll be able to support designers and engineers.

I think, Google Wave will have a huge potential in the future of collaboration. Email and other collaboration tools will be affected and will require to make their transformation to survive. It will be interesting in ride in my view. In my today’s examples, I was looking mostly on use cases when an email is heavily involved today. However, I’m sure, other examples will come as well.

Best, Oleg

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Posted by olegshilovitsky

Google Wave in Design and Process Collaboration

November 9, 2009

Picture 40In the past, I had chance to write about Google Wave (GW). Lots of interest coming around everything related to Google Wave. You can read some of my previous posts about Google Wave to get up to speed with my way to think about Google Wave.

Google Wave – Is it the Next Collaborative Process Engine for PLM?
6 reasons Why Google Wave will Change PLM Collaboration

So, the following interesting project from SAP drove my attention during the weekend, so I decided to share my thoughts about SAP Gravity project. However, before, take a look on video produced by SAP.

From the earlier beginning of Google Wave, it was clear that we could expect an impact of Google Wave on the enterprise software world. Despite the fact enterprises are using a big amount of unique and valuable enterprise systems, all of them are heavily relying on email to collaborate. Therefore, GW offering updated email collaboration paradigm will become an attractive guest in enterprise eco-system.

You can read more about Google Wave SAP Web 2.0 Blog.

So, what are my thoughts about Google Wave in the context of SAP demo project? I have to say that I’m experimenting with Google Wave too and my thoughts, of course, affected by my own experience with Google Wave.

Pros:
1. Collaboration between the unstructured communication world and structured business process definition is notable
2. Google Wave integration capabilities
3. Very powerful history representation
3. There is a huge potential for additional developments – Gadgets and Robots

Cons:
1. Keep of track of all your Waves is as complicated as emails- no big surprise in this space.
2. The way Google Wave will manage store of integrated information is not clear (i.e. BPMN for SAP Gravity, but future thinking about 3D models etc.)
3. Wave to Wave merges and communication can create additional complexity.

What is the future perspective for Google Wave in PLM space in my view? The most perspective direction is collaboration around 3D and other design-related situational collaboration. This is space that today occupied by mail. This is not an empty space – innovative products like 3DLive as well as other CAD / Viewers -related products are also targeting this space. However, I see a potential to embed live 3D model or drawing into Wave and provide an ability to participants to collaborate, similar to how BPMN process was created by SAP Gravity.

I would be interested to hear your opinion and thoughts.
Best, Oleg

6 Comments | Business Process Management, Collaboration, Daily PLM Think Tank, Future Trends | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky

PLM and Collaboration Platforms: Partnership or Buzzworks?

November 3, 2009

Collaboration is very important for product development including different phases – design, engineering, manufacturing etc. “Collaborative factor” is playing a very important role in development of CAD, PDM, PLM etc. I have to admit that engineering activities are very much different from areas like accounting and some others. For many years, development of capabilities to collaborate, was a very interesting and innovative factor related to development of CAD and PLM system.

However, time is moving forward together with technologies and collaboration is coming to our everyday life together with internet, mobile devices, office automation and other innovative technologies. So, everything becomes very “collaborative”. Question I want to ask today in simple way – should CAD/PLM related product think about wider adoption of collaborative capabilities coming from non-specific engineering and manufacturing world.

I was looking on the latest report in this area made by Forrester “Forrester Wave(TM): Collaboration Platform Q3 2009“.

Picture 34

According to the Forrester, the following functional areas considered as primary criteria to include vendors into their research:
-Collaborative workspace capabilities. This includes the ability to store and manage multiple
artifacts with the space, not just the ability to share content over a network.
-Basic content management capabilities. These capabilities allow users to access a single copy of
an artifact through the network.
-The ability to customize the space for specific business purposes. Personalized dashboards,
workspace templates, and workflow capability are examples of customizability.
-Enterprise capabilities for security and authentication. Access-control lists (ACLs), single-
sign on through Active Directory or LDAP support, and enterprise rights management
capabilities (ERM) are some of the key components for enterprise security and authentication
offered by these vendors.
-A development environment for building custom collaboration applications. The evaluated
vendors provide development options for firms with very specific internal needs or for power
users who want to self-provision custom applications.

From the standpoint of Product Lifecycle Management and Collaborative Product Development, I can see a lot of things are missing in this list to allow designers and engineers to collaborate. However, mentioned above capabilities fit very well tool. Special interest, in my view, also need to be done on the latest focus of collaborative platforms on the intersection between a content creation, traditional collaboration and social elements.

So, what is my intermediate conclusion? Collaborative platform’s evolution brings them more and more in the space of traditional product design and development collaboration.  Is it relevant and make sense to marry them, or we are just talking about “yet another collaborative buzzworks”? Is there overlap in platforms and functionality provided by PLM vendors? Do you think a notion of collaboration is so different in product design and development that make appropriate to develop specific platforms?

Just my thoughts.
Best, Oleg

5 Comments | CAD, Collaboration, Daily PLM Think Tank, Technology | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky

Do We Need Files to Collaborate in PLM?

November 2, 2009

Picture 32Interesting publication came during the weekend related to the future of collaboration. According to the analytical research, 80 Per Cent of Enterprise Collaboration Platforms Will Primarily Be Based on Web 2.0 Techniques by 2013 Managing Users’ Transition from File-Orientation to Web 2.0 Approach Will Be a Major Challenge. The main point of research and/or prediction made by Gartner is related to the difference between so called – “file based” and “browser based” collaboration came mostly in wiki-style and web 2.0 like tools and future migrations between them.

I’d like to take it a bit future and analyze what implications it can provide for future collaboration in product development. On one side, most of CAD based collaboration tools are file-based. Files are remaining the most significant piece of information people are collaborating on. Files come to the collaboration in a very different way – CAD files (obvious), many CAE related ones, Excel Files with variate of information resided into these files.

On the contrary, we can see many tools that purely web based on hybrid with significant dissociation from file content. Collaborative tools in the style of Wikis, collaboration tools come out Microsoft SharePoint, various Web tools are coming more and more loudly shows their place in collaboration.

Separately, I’d like to say few words about CAD and collaboration. Tools like CATIA V6 and associated 3DLive presents a new way collaborate on single product content (mainly design, for the moment). What will happen to these tools in the future? Will it be the foundation for the future non-file collaboration tools?

So, what is my conclusion today? Collaboration tools are slowly starting to their move from the need to read “files” into the direction to focusing more on pure “content”. In my view, this move will be slow, but this is a way to go. So, may be in 2013 years we’ll see a completely new way to collaborate as it according to the Gartner prediction? Hmm… interesting.. What do you think?

Best, Oleg

21 Comments | CAD, Collaboration, Daily PLM Think Tank | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky

SharePoint 2010 Communities and PLM Social Demands

October 27, 2009

Picture 14PLM is moving fast towards social computing and social product development. I had chance to share some of my previous thoughts related to social features in PLM  few weeks ago and we had a very good conversation. If you haven’t had chance to be involved, I’d suggest you to take a very brief look on the following posts as well as comments to these posts.

Emerging Social Economies and PLM communities

Social PLM Challenges

PLM Goes Social – Don’t forget your daily job!

Looking back I definitely would like to mention few very visible activities related to PLM and Social Trend: DS announcement of collaboration with Community Platform BlueKiwi, PTC social product development. Don’t miss also small vendors such as Vuuch stepping into this space with Social PLM and Business Communities.

Now, Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is coming with some very strong messages related to communities too. As you can see on the  slides, Microsoft put Community as one of the key pillars in their new SharePoint 2010 marketing mantra. With four key areas of experience- social content, social networking, teamwork and groups, SharePoint provide wide spread of potential benefits.

Picture 15
What is behind this? Actually quite many things. Microsoft is taking huge bulk of stuff, some of them are old in SharePoint such as Sites and Workspaces. Some of the features got a face – lift such as blogs, wikis, podcasting tools. Several new features and some of them very impressive released around people-related searches, tagging and social networking. You can see Microsoft’s marketing slide below. What is clear is that SharePoint 2010 is introducing a very significant bundle of tools that will make new SharePoint reminding even more than before “A universal enterprise hammer”.

Picture 17
However, I think, the biggest advantage of SharePoint as a platform is the ability to combine in the single box these multiple capabilities that in the normal situation need to be purchased from the different vendors and combined together.

So, with such background, SharePoint 2010 Social Computing presentation severely hit my mind with SP capabilities around social tools. It’s clear Product Development Activities can be significantly improved by using technologies and techniques developed by social networking tools. Software vendors developing products for manufacturing intensively investing in such features and concepts as communities, voting, the crowd-sourcing, tagging, micro-blogging, wikis and others. So, introducing of such features on popular Microsoft’s platform can be an interesting turn for Product Date/Lifecycle tools to jump over new capabilities. However, on the other side, I see SharePoint 2010 platform capabilities in business collaboration, information and knowledge management as very broad and requiring a very significant additional investment from future customers.

What is my conclusion today? SharePoint 2010 is a new kind of platform enterprises are going to experience in the near future. To see, how these technologies can co-exist without significant overlaps – this is a key for future PLM and SharePoint success. So far, we can wait until SharePoint 2010 BETA next month and expect some interesting new features and implementations.

Best, Oleg

2 Comments | Collaboration, Daily PLM Think Tank, Microsoft, Social Media and Tools | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
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Why PLM Need to Learn about SharePoint 2010 Composites?

October 21, 2009

Picture 5Some technology and infrastructure thinking today coming out of SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, NV. Without going to more systematic analyzes what Microsoft presented in future coming SharePoint 2010 version (beta is planned in November and release is next year), I’d like to go straight ahead and talk about very interesting topic, in my view, called SharePoint Composites.

Picture 6
As you can see on the picture above SharePoint composites are fundamental part of overall SharePoint marketing architecture and pretty much focuses on rapid creation of no-code collaborative solution. Looking on that together with the ability to unlock enterprise data, I said – this is something that sounds very PLMish? I think every PLM solution has a strategic need to collaborate and communicate with various pieces of enterprise data and systems. Bill of Materials in ERP, Customer information in CRM and endless list of various databases and homegrown solutions – this is the only initial list of enterprise data that we face in every PLM implementation.

So, let’s dig inside and see what Microsoft is planning to offer as part of Composites. The major piece of SharePoint composites is evolution of SharePoint BDC (Business Data Catalog). Back in SharePoint 2007, BDC was created to be able to read data from multiple external sources (Microsoft presents it as LOB- Line of Business Systems) and connects these multiple data sources into SharePoint Lists, Workspaces etc. BDC evolution path in SharePoint 2010 is what called – BCS (Business Connectivity Services). You can take a look on this picture bellow. What is important is that BCS is supporting full CRUD (for non-programming people – Create Read Update Delete) framework. So, the application will be able to make full manipulation of data in external systems. This is, of course, depends on technology systems will be connected (SQL or proprietary APIs / Web Services).

Picture 7
So, what is my short conclusion today from initial presentation and review of Microsoft composites and BCS? I think, this framework is an interesting approach SharePoint will use to acquire enterprise data and interplay with enterprise applications. There are two possible scenarios I can figure out for PLM applications with regards to SharePoint Composites:

1. Internal. This option assumes PLM application will be re-using elements of SharePoint composites to get broader system and enterprise data connectivity. This is something that I see logical and should be compliant, in my view, with how Microsoft Composites and BCS will be introduced for companies.

2. External. For this option SharePoint Composite and BCS specifically will assume PLM apps is one of the LOB. So, collaborative scenarios can be built on top of PLM data and interplay with enterprise data and collaborative processes that will come from other systems.

I’m sure, there are much more options and these are only major directions. Good place to see how BCS and Composites will be developed and implemented is to discover and learn everything happens between SharePoint and SAP applications. I’m sure we’ll see interesting scenarios and new types of applications coming out and based on new SharePoint technologies. However, it doesn’t mean it will introduce new conflicts between Microsoft technological frameworks and Enterprise Application vendors frameworks.

Stay tuned on next discussions about SharePoint and related technologies later this week.

Best, Oleg

4 Comments | Collaboration, Daily PLM Think Tank, Future Trends, Microsoft | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
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