Forcing people to enter data

The problems deploying Obamacare which is all over the news, started me thinking about PLM systems and  deployments. In an article by Michelle Melkin on Electronic Medical Records, she points out that there is building resistance in forcing medical practitioners to enter data. They see the first two to five minutes that are required to enter data into electronic health records systems as a waste of time for themselves and their patients. How many people in engineering have the same view of PLM?

Forcing people to enter data when they see no value in what they are doing results in a failed technology implementation. If people do not get anything in return for entering data, they will find ways to avoid they system.

PLM systems have to deliver value to the people who have to use the system. Borrowing from software development Agile practices, people need to "opt-in "http://newtechusa.net/agile/the-agile-adoption-game/. They have to want to use the PLM system because they get value from using the system. The system must make their life easier, solve a problem, remove a barrier. Just as with electronic medical records,  requiring people to enter data because management wants the data, will not work very well.

One reason people will opt-in to a PLM system is that it enables them to find things that they need. When people can find things they need, it saves them time. They see value in entering the data needed to find things. If you are implementing a PLM system, upgrading or just trying to improve adoption, concentrate on making search great.

Great presentations in the Social Product Development and Collaboration track at the 2012 PI Congress / PLM Roadmap Conference

Great presentations in the Social Product Development and Collaboration track at the 2012 PI Congress / PLM Roadmap Conference last week. The attendees were really interested in how social is impacting product development and product lifecycle management (PLM). The presentations will be available for download shortly.

My presentation discussed how applying information theory concepts improves collaboration and resulting innovation. This concept is a little "out there" I know, but it does make a huge amount of sense. When an information channel is stable and low entropy, a huge amount of  information, new data can be put over the channel. Innovation requires newness, change and lots of information transfer. We also discussed how to create a stable information channel using social media concepts and capabilities. For more information, you can contact me.

John Mannisto from Whirlpool Corporation presented his teams collaboration techniques. He discussed The “Commons”. It's a place where  Social Layers can combine and cross over to maximize our cross-flow of knowledge. He wants to be able to “go viral” with good ideas. The “Commons” social layer is the “water cooler” where explicit and tacit knowledge can combine.

John also told us we need to adopt new tools and new behavior - we need to get our kids involved. We need to learn from outside of work, because social media is outpacing corporate collaboration. We need to combine the new-generation behavior with the old engineering. Most engineering is based on Newton, Euler, and a bunch of French Mathematicians. What continues to change is the way we execute.

Bruce Richardson from Salesforce.com gave a great presentation on the coming combination of customer relationship management (CRM), social and PLM. With 4.5 billion people connected to social networks today, social has become the new way for sharing what we are doing and what we care about in our personal lives.  And for businesses, there are over 150 million daily conversions happening that are related to products and companies.  People are talking about your products and your company.  This is how your brand is being created.  You need to be able to connect with these customers.

Google Image Search

Imagine you are an engineer (maybe you are one) and you must find that picture you remember seeing about a failure mode. You spend hours trying to find it. Now imagine you type in a couple of words that you remember about the photo and boom! there it is! Fiction? nope. Not now. Google just announced personal photo search. in Google+ 

I may sound like a Google sales person but these pattern recognition and search technologies can be huge time savers. They can also save a company's butt when the engineers miss a potential problem just because they didn't find a critical piece of data. How many times  have I see that? Many.

http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/plus/index.html

I tried searching my own photos in Google+. I searched for the word "beach". Sure enough all the pictures of beaches came up, Awesome!

PLM Cannot Deal with Flexibility

I posted this is response to a blog entry made by Oleg Shilovitsky, PLM and Data Modeling Flux

PLM systems have had a very hard time with data flexibility or data plasticity. Even more so, PLM systems do not handle hierarchical classification particularly well either. The same rigidity needed for document revisions does not work for constantly evolving product and components attributes. It's one of the reasons why I recommend a PLM solution architecture to my clients that is composed of a PLM system, search and attribute management solutions.

Think about all the rows (data) and columns (attributes) engineers manage with individual spreadsheets. The amount of time wasted in managing these characteristics about products and components is truly staggering.  The number of errors and product issues due to miscommunication of attribute data has resulted in billions of losses. You would think there would be a huge economic incentive to addressing this problem!

Microsoft Collaboration

I tested Microsoft's collaboration capabilities including skydrive, outlook, excel, powerpoint, etc.  My overall conclusion when compared to Google, is that Microsoft is almost there but not quite ready for prime time.  As with Google, you have to work differently.  Collaboration takes a little extra effort by each individual to enable improved productivity of the group.

Here is what I found:

• The UI is just like what you would expect for a Microsoft application, even the web versions of the apps.  This is nice.  It is familiar to people using MS applications.
• Skydrive gives you access to all your files from a web browser the entire application suite is enabled for touch devices.
• However, real-time collaboration is not ready yet.  I tried editing a document online with another person and my updates were not shown on his screen.  This is frustrating and confusing for the user.
• As with the Google applications, not all the functions available in the native apps are available in the web app which is what you have to use to real-time collaborate.
• Lastly the document formatting is not maintained.  A 2 column format will show up as one page in the skydrive web app.

It's going to get interesting.  Google and Microsoft fighting the the collaboration high ground.

Structuring data on the web

Oleg Shilovisky raises some very interesting topics in his Blog Beyond PLM.  In his latest blog, he discusses Why PLM Should Care About the Web Data Commons Project

The Web Commons Data Project is a great idea because product data on the web is a mess and pretty much useless. Today, fining parts and components is extremely difficult, time consuming and error prone. Neither Google or Amazon have solved this problem despite their tremendous search capabilities. This is why many companies have developed internal parts catalogs and approved supplier lists.

The reason for structured data is so we can find products, parts or components on the web. Beyond that, we should be able to use the structured data in our own work. The amount of time wasted finding product information is huge. Once the product is found, it is rekeyed into countless spreadsheets. If we had good, structured product data, we should be able to just use it in our own spreadsheets.

Companies that have built internal product catalogs and used them to rationalize parts have created huge value. Whirlpool, for instance, generated $2.7B in free cash flow over two years by rationalizing components and their supplychain.

What we really need is a universally updatable data structure which would enable companies to publish their component data and for us to effortlessly consume it. In full disclosure, I have been working on this problem for a number of years after founding Convergence Data Services. If you are interested in discussing more. Let me know.

Visual Explanation of Social Business Collaboration

This is a good visual explaining social business collaboration. Social business collaboration is not the same as personal collaboration.

Setting the Record Straight on Social Business [Collaboration] infographic

 

What about big data for products?

This is good infographic explaining big data but fails to recognize the need for more structured data about products.  People who develop products spend a tremendous amount of time re-entering data that someone else has already created.  With big data capability, why isn't there a better way to store and manage product data?

Big data Infographic infographic

Innovation in Aviation

Most of my posts are about using social networking to improve product development  but sometimes I see something which demonstrates the power of creativity and innovation despite ample regulation.  The Aviation industry is very well regulated, so much so, that innovation is slow and extremely costly.  Hence, the aviation industry is very slow to innovate.  Heck, we are flying with aircraft engines that were developed in the 1930s.  No kidding.  But here is a person who came up with a unique approach.  He develop an electric powered airplane so light and efficient it fits in the ultralight vehicle category (FAR part 103).  This means and can sell them fully assembled without all the regulatory hurdles required by a certified airplane.

Is PLM too Complex for a Single Company to Implement?

Oleg Shilovitsky has an interesting observation about Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Systems technology.

http://beyondplm.com/2013/04/03/plm-journey-and-thoughts-about-technology/

His conclusion is

...that the realities of PLM implementations today are high cost, extensive need of services and expensive implementation. Which can be solved by hiring an army of consulting people to take a company through the “PLM transformation” period. That would be a “PLM journey” as we know it now. A potential alternative it to bring new level of technology that will provide new user experience, device independence as well as plug-n-play technology that eliminate needs to people to be involved into long implementations . Do you think it is a dream? I don’t think so… just my thoughts.

It may be that Oleg is correct. PLM systems are so complex and require so much resource they can only be delivered by cloud based solutions that are vertically integrated.  Building the server and network capability that will satisfy user expectations is a daunting task.  I know.  I just spend the last five years deploying Windchill for a large manufacturer at 26 tech centers in 13 countries.  No matter how much money we invested the users were never satisfied.  They want performance that rivaled Google, Facebook and Amazon.  It was impossible for us to deliver GooFacAm performance.  We could not afford the network and server capacity, not to mention that the underlying technology would not support true data distribution.   Google on the other hand, owns everything from the fiber to the browser and if you own a chomebook and/or Galexy Nexus, the computer and phone as well.  One can argue that their UI delivery is not very good, but no one can argue that their infrastructure isn't top notch.  Google delivers less than 200 ms latency for every application anywhere in the world.  To collaboration effectively, users need fast.  PLM just is not fast.  It takes too much investment for a single company to deliver PLM that will meet users expectations.

Collaboration is the primary function delivered by PLM systems.  We have learned over the last several years that Google, Facebook and Amazon deliver a superior collaboration experience.

 

Example of social product development

This video shows an an example of social product development using multi-touch devices.  This is how product development will look in a couple of years.  People will work remotely and participate in virtual co-located teams using multi-touch devices.  I call this concept "The Everywhere Wall".  This is excerpt from a much longer video produced by Microsoft to give us a glimpse of the future.

Social Product Development in action: Linux

I'll admit it.  I'm a Linux user.  For those of you who don't know what Linux is, it's a computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution.  Essentially you can install it on just about any computer from very small to very large.  There are many versions to match just about anybody's desires.  And it is very secure.  Why do I bring up Linux in the context of Social Product Develop & Collaboration?

Linux is an example of how social collaboration has propelled innovation.  There are four essential ingredients: standards, findabilty, organic development and motivation.  Android development is a similar example of the explosive power of social product development.

What is curious to me is that this same social product development fabric does not exist in most product development companies.  There is very little use of social applications, people cannot find previous knowledge and they lack motivation to innovate.

Linux started in 1991 with the commencement of a personal project by a Finnish student, Linus Torvalds, to create a new free operating system kernel.  Linus developed a basic set of software applications and standards for how software programs would communicate with the hardware and between other software programs.   Since then, the resulting Linux kernel has grown constantly from a small number of C files under a license prohibiting commercial distribution to its state in 2009 of over 370 megabytes of source under the GNU General Public License.

If you have a question about Linux, you will find an answer.  There are thousands of blogs, personal websites and wikis all connected by google.  After a while you learn exactly how to phase the question to get a good answer.  I haven't seen this same information fabric exist in any company.

Linux develop organically.  There was no master plan.  A small group of people started sharing their knowledge, built on each other's knowledge, exchanged ideas and code all through social media means.  Now there is a huge developer community.  Again, where is this ability in most companies?

Why do people develop Linux?  Is it for the money?  Nope.  It's free software so it can't be for the money.  There is abundant research that says people are NOT motivated by money after their basic needs are met.  They are motivated by autonomy, mastery and purpose.  Developing a Linux app, you can essentially do what you want, program it to work the way you want it to work.  There is tremendous self-satisfaction when a person becomes a master developing software.  There is a deep purpose behind Linux.  Open software.

Bringing social tools and techniques inside companies can enable the same explosion in creativity and innovation.

Any App across any Device

Today Google announced "Race to win on big and small screens with Chrome Super Sync Sports".  I bet this is "game" is being used as a test.  Imagine any application being able to collaborate in real-time with anyone from a mobile device.  Is this what Google is really testing? http://chrome.blogspot.com/2013/02/race-to-win-on-big-and-small-screens.html

The type of real-time collaboration being demonstrated by this application could be very useful for coordinating activities and enabling product development teams to be more efficient.  A lot of time is wasted when people have repeat work because their work is changed or influenced by someone else's activity.  With real-time collaboration, this rework is eliminated.

Why Social Product Development

Co-location, when all product development team members are working in the same room, is no longer a sufficient or affordable alternative for developing complex products.  To be profitable, products must be developed for global markets which demands knowledge be sourced from locations and regions where it is most cost effective.  Competitive advantage is achieved by bringing together knowledge and capabilities from different places.  Information Technology can provide a means to implement effective and efficient virtual co-location but so far, the results have been less than satisfactory. Read more...