PLM, Social Apps and How to Design Next Airplane on the Facebook?

March 27, 2013

The conversation about social software is getting more mature these days. Do you remember early period of "social software" talks. Navigate to the following link – We are not going to design an airplane on the Facebook! The discussion on Jim Brown’s blog is 3 years old. Jim brings his pros and cons of having Facebook as a platform for product development. Even if the title of blog post didn’t provide much chance to Facebook to be used in product development, I captured some pros. Here is an interesting passage -

It is hard to get people to work together effectively. It takes a lot of different skills (technical, marketing, financial, etc.) to bring a profitable product to market. And beneath those classifications, there are more sub-skills. In the technical domain there are designers, engineers, validation/analysis people, compliance experts, manufacturing resources and quality personnel. Down another level inside engineering, many products require mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, and software engineers. You get the point – there are a lot of skills (and therefor people) involved. This is true for even simple products, let alone an airplane. If the fundamental truth is that it is hard to keep all of these people informed and working together – and you believe there is value in improving it – how can social computing in PLM be anything but inevitable?

Now, let’s go 3 years forward. We can see major enterprise vendors such as Microsoft and Salesforce.com are applying social applications as a major communication paradigm that will be used for their Office 365 and Salesforce.com CRM apps. Couple of articles I captured earlier this week. Navigate to SharePoint blog post – Yammer and SharePoint: Enterprise social roadmap update. Microsoft acquired Yammer for $1.2B earlier last year. Currently Microsoft is embedding Yammer social tools to replace Office 365 newsfeed. Future integration options are including co-editing of Office documents.

Customers will still have the option of choosing between Yammer and the SharePoint newsfeed, but this new, integrated Yammer experience will offer Single Sign-On (SSO) and seamless navigation. In other words, when you click on the Yammer link in the Office 365 global navigation bar, Yammer will appear immediately below with the navigation to get back to Office 365 services such as Outlook and Sites. You will also see the user experiences of Yammer and Office 365 begin to converge (see the concept mock below to get a directional sense). This new Yammer experience will also offer rich document capabilities, integrating the Office Web Apps to add editing and co-editing of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents.

yammer-office365-social.jpg

Another example – Salesforce.com Chatter app. Salesforce.com introduced chatter back in 2010. Since then the application becomes more visible and dominant in Saleforce user experience. Earlier last week CEO Marc Benioff Says Chatter Will Become Primary Interface For Salesforce. Salesforce unveiled Chatter 8.0, which executives said is the next generation CRM.

Benioff, speaking in Boston, provided his usual context for discussing Salesforce. He talked about the rise of mobile; how people are connecting and the rise of Twitter and Facebook. He then used that framing as a transition to say how Chatter, an activity stream platform, is becoming the primary interface into Salesforce. He called it a significant step that other companies will follow.

Activity stream paradigm is clearly taking off as a new way to communicate between people. I compared it to old "file explorer" paradigm we used last 30+ years everywhere. Navigate to my blog post from the last week to read more. To me activity stream paradigm will take us from old desktop world to future world of cloud and connected services.

What is my conclusion? PLM industry is starting to put more attention to user experience. It becomes an issue for individuals small companies and large corporations like Boeing. Activity stream is a new paradigm taking roots in social networks to bring a new style of communication and information sharing. Watch this move that will happen among all companies in the next 2-3 years. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Social PLM: From File Explorer to Activity Streams

March 20, 2013

Social hype is getting down. I can say it about PLM industry too. We can see less “social startups” and less marketing hype about how next big social revolution will come and solve all existing problems in PLM technologies and systems. If you want to catch up with my previous thoughts about social PLM, I recommend you to read – How to prevent social PLM from marketing fluff? and Why Social PLM 1.0 Failed? My conclusion about the failure of Social PLM focused on the fact “social PLMs” missed the value of customer function and instead of that, focused on value proposition only. As a result of that, they missed usage and customer adoption – two factors that absolutely important to make a shift in PLM systems.

It is interesting to see how social systems are expanding their influence in other enterprise systems like CRM and ERP. One of them is Chatter for Salesforce.com. I’ve been reading TechCrunch article about Chatter update for mobile yesterday. Navigate to the following link to read it – The New Salesforce.com CRM Platform Is Chatter And It’s Made For Mobile. What was interesting is how Chatter is proliferating to become a universal way to get information out of CRM system and communicate with other people. It made me think about social system and shifting paradigm from File Explorer way to Social way. Here is an interesting passage I captured:

Chatter, the company’s activity stream service that it launched in 2010, now has the capability for a customer to access records, edit them and take action on an account, all from a mobile device. It essentially brings CRM to the customer’s mobile phone, iPad or tablet. The updated app is now available in the Apple App Store and Google Play. The app is a significant improvement over the Salesforce.com mobile app, and has one feature that is particularly noteworthy. Chatter Publisher overlays the Chatter activity stream. Its look is reminiscent of the tiles feature on Windows Mobile Phone and the overall Windows UI.

File Exporer Paradigm

For a long time, File Explorer was a main user experience paradigm we had on the computer. File explorer was with us from early days of Windows. File explorer (folder) paradigm expanded with the tools like Outlook and becomes even wider discovery paradigm for information – folders / hierarchical discovery.

File explorer paradigm expanded even into first versions of mobile devices. On the following picture you can see an early version of mobile device UI also presenting sort of file explorer.

PDM/PLM systems are inherited File Explorer paradigm in many ways. Most of successful PDM projects inherited File Explorer user experience because it was familiar and usable. Even today, many PLM UIs looks like File Explorer.

Social Paradigm

Social paradigm roots are taking us to early days of social networks. It started as a communication tools only (messaging, chatting) and expanded as a tools to share content among group of people (Twitter, Facebook, Google+). The function of content share became even more important when mobile came to place. The ability to embed content such as video, photos in communication expanded the reach and value of these tools. The information delivery model shifted from “folder, file and share” to “activity stream with embedded content” coming from social peers.

Enterprise vendors took the activity stream paradigm beyond the point of photo/video sharing. Social applications like Chatter and others are helping you to share information content coming from files and other enterprise application in the way similar to Facebook and Google+ are sharing photos and videos. The last Chatter update just proved it again.

What is my conclusion? Shifting paradigms. In my view, we see it just in front of our eyes. What was obvious and straightforward experience for PDM/PLM systems for the last decade will become a nonsense for the generation of 2010s customers. People want their working environment to have the same experience as games, internet and mobile devices today. I can see “activity streams” paradigm as an an interesting experience that will displace current enterprise systems UI in many places. I don’t expect enterprise systems to be like Facebook. However, I think social applications will play a significant role in the future of user experience. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Why PLM should pay attention to Facebook Graph Search?

January 22, 2013

One of the biggest tech events for me last week was Facebook Graph Search. If you haven’t heard about this, you better to catch up. There are tons of articles about new Facebook Graph search, but service is still in the Beta phase. You can submit for Beta here and hope to get it soon. So, the best you can do for the moment is to read about other people experience. The stories about Graph search are mixing technical, user and business content. Many of reviewers are taking Facebook graph search as a new Facebook monetizing mechanism. You can read Forbes article Facebook Graph Search Runs On Likes That Advertisers Have Already Paid For, which provides a good review of what Facebook announced. You can have a read of the following blog Under the Hood: Building Graph Search Beta sharing some beta experience with Facebook Graph Search. Finally, watch the video with Zuck presenting Graph search as as third pillar of Facebook.

Graph Search is clearly technological challenge fro Facebook in terms of scale of data. Here is an interesting quote I captured from Digital Spy article.

Graph Search has been a huge engineering challenge for Facebook, as it involved the indexing of data from 1 billion accounts, 240 billion photos and over 1 trillion connections on the social network, but also factoring in the myriad of privacy settings dictating who should be able to see what.

Why Graph Search is important for PLM?

Here is a question you may ask me – why is it important? Here is my take so far on a reason why PLM and enterprise vendors should pay attention on Facebook experiments with search. As we learned for the last decade – scale matters. For the last 10-15 years, the really scalable systems were developed for public web first and then replicated in the enterprise. This trend was different back in 1980s and 1990s when complex problems first were solved in military and defense. What we learned from Google for the last 10 years is that system can scale up enormously. However, Google public web search never faced the problems of privacy, accounts separation and diversity users. Google came to the similar problem earlier last year with injection of personal social results. To me, this dimension of scale is not well developed. Noise vs. signal problem in highly diversified by multiple accounts data corpus is an interesting problem to work on. Facebook is chasing long tail of all Facebook accounts, likes, connections, etc. This is a level of scale I can imagine in enterprise systems or even value chain of OEM and suppliers. This is where things get interesting.

What is my conclusion? Remember, 3-5 years the question of web scalability was introduced as a serious showstoppers for enterprise systems to scale up outside of corporate data center. Almost nobody is talking about that nowadays. It is clear to all of us that public web powerhouses like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. proved that systems can scale. Facebook Graph is a step in a direction that can be very close to social collaboration in any enterprise company and beyond. Important. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Product Lifecycle and Social Timeline

January 8, 2013

I want continue the conversation about the intersection of social software and PLM. Yesterday blog Why Social PLM 1.0 failed? made me think about how to find a single utility for user in that context. As Jim Brown mentioned in his comment earlier, the social hype calmed down and PLM eco-system didn’t change overnight. All together it brings me to the point of finding additional value-add services.

The following blog post caught my attention – 5 Fun Ways to Travel Back in Time with Your Social Data. The article speaks about tools helping us to discover, analyze and get back in history of our social channels – LinkedIn, Twitter, Facbook, etc. One of the tools – Vizify drove my special interest. The application with a very easy user interface helped me to get access and analyze my twitter behavior as well as connection to photo, linkedin and facebook. Take a look on few screen shots I’ve made. You can also see the results by navigating to this link.

I found an interesting intersection between social, timeline and big data. PLM lifecycle function is somewhat that can be improved by a similar experience. To have the ability to access product historical data, making analyzes and merge information can be extremely interesting. Think about the ability to merge product releases with customer social stream and defect database. I can bring more examples. The utility was able to analyze my data fast, easy and without heavy IT involvement. I understand that getting access to public services like Twitter and Facebook is easier than to your corporate ERP system. At the same time the trend towards simplification and added value cloud services is clear to me.

What is my conclusion? In my view, Social PLM 1.0 was completely focused on how to create and collaborate. To me it was an obvious attempt – collaborative design and engineering was always a focus of CAD/PLM vendors . However, think about single user utility and the value of additional services. Social timeline (or lifecycle timeline in the context of PLM) can be an interested feature and value added utility. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Why Social PLM 1.0 Failed?

January 7, 2013

What do you think about "social PLM" trend? I don’t see many cheerleaders of social PLM nowadays. The excitement and social PLM fluff is over. Some of these companies turned into boring "collaborating utilities" with a flavor or enterprise security. Some of companies produced good "facebook user experience clones" and got acquired by enterprise vendors. Overall, "social" didn’t created a revolution in PLM. So, it is a good time to think about what happened and learn lessons for the future.

I’ve been reading A VC blog by Fred Willson of Union Ventures. Read this short article – Single User Utility In A Social System. The conclusion of Fred about single utility resonated. Fred brings "delicious example", which is very good in my view. Here is my favorite passage:

One of the most important lessons we took from delicious was the value of single user utility in social systems. It might seem odd that systems designed to leverage interactions between people can have (should have?) single person utility. But I strongly believe they should. The first users of delicious were barely aware of and rarely used its social aspects. They just wanted to store their bookmarks in the cloud instead of in their browser. And they liked the tag based classification system. And they liked being able to use their links from any device. That was the single person utility delicious was built on. But because bookmarks were public by default which resulted in most links being shared with others, a large social system developed. The delicious popular page was an important web destination in its day and most of those visitors never posted a link to delicious. They consumed others’ links.

I’d bring few additional examples. First – photo sharing websites. Most of them started as a place for photographers to keep their photos and only after added an additional function of sharing photos. Another one – GPS navigation, which originally single utility function. Then we can see "social navigation" system like Waze created social value beyond this single function.

Social PLM focus on "collaboration" was a right one. However, it missed a single function that can provide an ultimate value to a single user. What is that function? I can speculate it is the ability to share and manage data supplied be a single user. Similar to photo websites and later to many other Web 2.0 sites, a single content creation and management function was missed. With more systems moving to cloud today, we have a chance to fix this problem.

What is my conclusion? When it comes to enterprise software, value proposition is a key element in a sales process. Nothing wrong here. However, it was a point where "social PLM 1.0" activities failed. Most of social PLM products and initiatives were too focused on company value proposition and missed a single "user function" that can make them useful for people in a company first. However, you cannot stop people from innovation. Next wave of social initiatives is coming and it won’t miss single user function to make it successful.

Best, Oleg

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Social PLM and Crowd Thinking Opportunity

November 9, 2012

Two months ago, I had a chance to speak at Social PLM 2012 virtual conference. It is a good time to check what happens with "social PLM" topic these days. I found few bits of information – Kenesto just announced about how it enables "social business through process collaboration", earlier this month Autodesk announced the acquisition of Qontext to enhance social functions of Autodesk 360, Vuuch announced about "new activity stream feature" and strong customer adoption. I haven’t heard anything from Nuage developing new social business collaboration platform.

What was common among all these announcements earlier and now was that CAD/PLM vendors are mostly focusing on their effort in "social software" to improve internal collaboration capabilities? I don’t have any problem with that. Collaboration is important. To bring modern collaboration patterns developed by companies like Facebook, Twitter and others are important. So-called activity stream becomes a standard user experience for collaboration in many systems. Qontext acquisition and Vuuch activity stream are two examples to confirm.

At the same time, there is another aspect of "social business" – consumer space. In my view, this is a place that changed significantly for the last 5 years. The way we share information in public and the way we communicate online are completely different these days. It also means that we create a tremendous amount of "social data". In my view, to use this information as well as communicate with customers online is a big opportunity in the space of product development. I’ve been reading IT insider blog earlier this week. Navigate to the following link to read – Two surprising statistics on social business progress in the enterprise. I found one of them remarkable. The picture is below. Here is an important passage to read:

The second big reveal for me was the number of companies who indicated there is no real integration between their external social initiatives (social media/customer outreach) and their internal social efforts (a.k.a. Enterprise 2.0). It was nearly unanimous: 96% reported there was nothing today that integrated their social business initiatives, although nearly half reported this was on the planning board.

So, companies are really bad in their effort to bring external social initiatives and connect them to the business. I haven’t heard much about such type of initiatives in PLM space. The exclusion maybe the acquisition of Netvibes by Dassault System. The following quote from DS website site states exactly that:

Netvibes Dashboard Intelligence helps enterprises monitor and manage everything on real-time, personalized dashboards for better, faster decision-making. Now you can understand everything that matters across all your internal systems and across the social Web, anywhere, anytime, on any device.

What is my conclusion? I think there is a potential in more efficient usage of "social data" in product development. To find what customers are saying about products, to react on customers’ complains and follows user interests – this is only a short list of examples how integration of publicly available social information can be beneficial. Big Data is the name of the trend how to make prediction based on socially available data. Interesting opportunity. I don’t see companies are doing much in this space. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Image courtesy of [fotographic1980] / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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What PLM must learn from the success of Email?

September 7, 2012

One of the biggest issues PLM vendors want to solve today is "PLM adoption". PDM/PLM moved from a toolbox to out-of-the-box (OOTB), from OOTB to industry best practices. Cloud is another promise. Another buzzword PLM industry is using today is "social". In my view, the best way to learn about the user adoption is to learn from the somebody else’s success. Speaking about the adoption in the organization, email is always on the top in my list. You probably had a chance to read my blog post last year – DIY PLM and Zero email policy. In my view "social" is having hard time to compete with emails. In many situations, company processes are literally run by emails. Enterprise software vendors are trying to kill emails with variety of tools, but email doesn’t want to die. I was reading an interesting article earlier this week – Email Will Never Die – The Man Who Invented It Reveals Why. I recommend you to have a look. I found some unknown facts about email history. I liked the following passage:

“I think it was mostly used as a replacement for telephone calls,” Tomlinson says. “You got a more immediate response. With time zone differences, you didn’t have to have someone there to receive the call.”

By co-incidence, my attention caught by another article on the same topic – Is email dead? Or is it moving to social networks? Samuel Driessen is capturing the discussion about why email will stay long time with us. The most important arguments are ease of access, email documentation trail, cross time zone access and openness.

Both articles made me think about what PLM vendors and implementers need to learn from the email success to improve PLM adoption across the organization. Here are my top 3 actions:

1. Access. The top priority for PLM tools is to become easy accessible for people in organization. 90% of people in organization are consuming information that created by less than 10% of people. To make PLM tools available and easy for the majority of people is absolutely important.

2. Openness. Email is incredibly open. I don’t need to work with your email server to send you an email. The infrastructure is open and technology is invisible. To make PLM to work seamlessly is another huge action. Today, "integration" is a significant showstopper to make PLM tools to be used by many people in organization.

3. Communication trail. This is an interesting topic that can provide huge value in organization. In many situations, the communication between people gets lost in emails and phone calls. PLM tools need to provide a way to capture this communication in a very painless way to make this communication history retrievable and available for people. It will help a lot for decision making and many other situations.

What is my conclusion? PLM vendors can learn a lot of email success. Email is still one of the major communication instruments in the organization. To learn from email practice, to apply it in PLM tools and make PLM tools to be integrated with email is the right way to go to become successful in PLM deployment. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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New Collaboration and Data Hostage Game

August 17, 2012

Think about the most overused term in PDM/PLM software for the last decade (or even more). Collaboration. It was developed and sold in different flavors and packages. Remember CPDM – Collaborative PDM? Later it became Collaborative PLM. Moreover, don’t forget e-Collaboration and many others. If you want to refresh your memory, navigate to the following link with CIMdata article – Definition of cPDM.

Time is moving fast. Last decade of internet, consumer devices, mobile and web 2.0 changed the face of how we share information and collaborate online. At the end of the day, I need to collaborate with my family, kids, friends and I do it on-line in a very efficient way. So efficient, that the question "how I can do the same in my company?" becomes almost obvious.

Earlier today, the following paper commentary from CIMdata came to me via twitter (thanks Chad Jackson for his tweet). The article The Changing Face of Collaboration (Commentary) is speaking about how Collaboration is changing as a result of influence made by the technology, mobile and consumer based software. Here is the first important passage I captured

In many ways we are witnessing the convergence of a number of technology-driven themes that have the potential of significantly changing collaborative work processes within and outside of a company’s four walls. The first technology-driven theme can be categorized as the consumerization of information technology (IT). The second is the explosion in the availability, capability, and usability of mobile information delivery devices. And the third is the entrance of social media-savvy individuals, who’ve grown up using Facebook, Twitter, and the Internet, into the corporate workforce. This convergence is well underway and today’s companies need to prepare and implement the appropriate processes and technologies that support the new way of collaborating.

Later, author is making the conclusion about the absolute need to develop new collaborative processes, otherwise we will become dinosaurs of the previous PLM solutions. Here is another passage:

The need to define and enable new collaborative processes and enabling technologies are not optional, they are mandatory–not only for Generation Y but also for the rest of us who need to compete in this highly collaborative and connected world. Without providing the correct level of support, today’s PLM solutions will be tomorrow’s legacy systems.

Well, we have a bunch of new technologies, new Gen-Y workforce. What next? What needs to be done in order to deliver a new kind of collaborative processes? It made me think about openness again. Let think about the web and social networking. Availability of the information on the web was one of the most important prerequisites allowed companies to develop websites and apps that deliver value (starting from Google search and ending with last social nets like Pinterest).

There is a problem that does exist in all PDM / PLM systems. These systems are taking data hostages. Let me explain what I mean. Whatever they manage – files, processes, communication stays in the system. In general, almost all of them claim openness, but in practice it doesn’t mean much. You can make a test by trying to share data out of these systems using some generic infrastructure without exporting the date (for example, in Excel file). How I can share Bill of material from my PDM system in SharePoint without exporting it? How I can share preview of my CAD model on the supplier website of my company without "dance with a tambourine" and additional coding?

What is my conclusion? In order to facilitate collaboration, PDM/PLM software products need to stop taking data hostages. It means sharing of information out of these systems needs to become a first priority for product data management software. The open infrastructure of data sharing will create a new eco-system that will help people to collaborate. After this stage, we can expect many other companies and products to come with applications helping people to collaborate using openly available information. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

image credit sheelamohan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Will Social PLM Work Only for Execs?

August 8, 2012

Social. New buzz. You can hear it in many places. After the tremendous success of social networking and web, many companies are trying to apply it in different domains. So, PLM does. I’ve been watching the activity of big companies and small startups in the intersection of social and PLM space – Social Product development by PTC, 3DSwYm Social Innovation by Dassault Systems, VuuchEnterprise Social Software, Nuage Social Business Collaboration – this is only a short list of products and companies chasing PLM social horizons.

Jim Brown, well-known industry analyst and my PLM blogging buddy, raised the question on twitter – Is Social Computing in Product Development Still Growing? You can navigate to the following link to read what is Jim’s opinion about the “social” topic.
 

Jim is running a survey on social product innovation and product development here. I recommend you to read blog and article written by Jim about social computing in product development. My favorite passage from Jim’s blog post is this:

My (Jim Brown) Belief. I am on the record saying I believe the use of social computing techniques in product development is inevitable. To me, there is an obvious benefit of pairing the “team sports” of innovation and product development with technology that helps teams better share information (within the team, with other experts, and with customers).

However, Jim doesn’t have a crystal ball. So, who has a different opinion? Navigate here to read Mashable article- 45% of Executives Think Social Media Has a Positive Impact on the Workplace. This article is quite interesting in the context of social product development. And here is a reason why. When 45% of execs are confident “social” has a positive impact, only 27% of employees agree. Here is a snippet of Mashable publication:

Executives think social media has a positive impact because it allows managers to be more transparent (38%), helps build and maintain relationships among colleagues (46%), helps build company culture (41%), and fosters a feeling of connection to the company and its leadership (37%)… However, employees disagree with their workplace superiors. Only 33% saying compensation and 24% saying financial performance have effects on company culture. Employees rank regular and candid communications (50%), employee recognition (49%) and access to management and leadership (47%) as having the largest impact.

What is my conclusion? I think vendors need to separate technology from marketing buzz. I can see cases when technologies and social media can create many opportunities for PLM vendors and companies. The examples are communication with customers, big data and others. However, I believe many of these values are not connected directly to all employees, which creates a concern from their side. In addition to that, I can see also how vendors are trying to wrap existing technologies into “social envelope” and hope for good. It is not gonna work. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Why Engineers Don’t Like Company Private Social Networks?

July 22, 2012

Couple of weeks ago, I discussed the potential of Yammer / Microsoft bundle to influence PLM field – Will Microsoft-Yammer kill Social PLM… Not yet. Actually, it seems to me Yammer indeed created some influence on what startups in PLM field are doing.Vuuch, last announcement introduces the ability to create company discussion groups.

In a nutshell, it looks exactly like Yammer idea. The employees of any company can register with their company emails and get an access to discussions inside of the same domain. Here is the link to a short video I found in the email from Vuuch:

Social PLM attempts

In my view, Vuuch is one of the leaders in trying to apply "social-networking" ideas in product development and enterprise. I can see similar attempts coming from large vendors too. The videos below show Dassault 3DSwYm and Windchill SocialLink experimenting with the idea of communities for product development.

Can we ask engineers to behave in a social way?

When you speak about communities, the adoption is a key. Yammer claimed 5 million users and 85% of Fortune 500 companies are using Yammer. Here is the link on Yammer’s Crunch base profile :

With a Freemium model, Yammer enables employees to voluntarily adopt the service. A premium version is available to paying customers and includes additional administrative and security controls, integration with other applications, priority customer service, and a dedicated customer success manager. More than 5 million users, including employees from 85 percent of the Fortune 500, have adopted Yammer’s Software-as-a-Service solution.

I wasn’t able to find numbers related to user adoption of social PLM tools. Are you aware about successful implementation of private social communities in product development and manufacturing? I wanted to raise a provoking question – what is wrong with social PLM communities? Is it about not attractive content, user experience, absence of interest and/or need?

Recently, GrabCAD raised quite many splashes in the engineering space – 250,000 engineers, 45,000 CAD models and 3M downloads. However, GrabCAD is not in the business of private communities for product development. Taking into account their latest announcement, I have to say "not yet". Another interesting example of community building is Local Motors – the place for people (engineers included) to create influencing vehicles together.

What is my conclusion? I think, PLM companies are missing some points in the space of social networking for enterprise. Here is my list of suspects – complicated user experience created by social PLM pioneers, anti-social engineering nature, engineer’s focus on "cool stuff" and ignorance of corporate oriented tools. These are just my guesses and thoughts… I’m interested in your opinion. Speak your mind…

Best, Oleg

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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