A couple of weeks ago Jos Voskuil wrote what I considered to be a fairly strong article titled "How com PLM is Boring?". In the article Jos makes the point that certain aspects of product lifecycle management can be "an IT or academic view… which can be confusing and complex topics." He goes on to discuss how PLM can be fun which he relates to the changes PLM can effect on business process. The most interesting part of the article was the reaction. There were numerous people that either failed to read or understand the entire article or just flat disagreed that the more technical elements (i.e. complex) of PLM are boring. Jos' article was really about how to effectively spread the ideas of PLM throughout industry and increase adoption of the process and technology. Interestingly, the people who replied to the article are the key to making that happen. This article will explore how to effectively disseminate the ideas and benefits of PLM in a manner that will resonate beyond early adopters and innovators and how PLM liked sliced bread is a good idea that needs a little help to become widespread.

It is time to debunk the myths around the painting of the Golden Gate Bridge. I was told during a city tour long ago that the painting of the bridge was a continuous process, once they were finished at one end they would start over at the other. It turns out that after the bridge was completed in 1937 it wasn't painted again until 1965. Advance corrosion required that the original paint be replaced with an inorganic silicate primer and an acrylic emulsion topcoat. This program was completed in 1995 and since then continuous touch ups are required on corroded areas. While this version of the story doesn't quite match up to my original belief about the bridge it does tend to better mirror what goes on with the adoption and continuous tweaking that tends to happen with product lifecycle management(PLM) systems. Since I spent the week in San Francisco at the Oracle Value Chain Summit using the iconic Golden Gate Bridge as a symbol for successful methodologies in relation to PLM seemed like a natural. This article will wrap up my time at the summit and discuss the best strategies to employ when maintaining and expanding the PLM footprint.

As promised I am trying to chronicle the highlights from the first annual Oracle Value Chain Summit in San Francisco. Building on the success of last year's PLM only event Oracle has collocated several of their product lines from the application side of their business for a focused event on how Oracle drives business value. The event sold out from an attendance perspective and there are 300 people here just for Agile PLM which is by far the largest percentage of attendees based on product lines. Oracle is known for using their influence ($$) to draw some well know speakers but I was still surprised to see John Madden's name on the schedule as a speaker for the first day of the event. As someone who has made some big reaches to try and tie PLM into everyday life I was interested in how Oracle would make this relevant to enterprise software and business process. The speaker from Deloitte had the unenviable task of preceding Madden in a ten minute window. In fairness I walked into his presentation mid-stream so it didn't really resonate with me until he got to his last two slides. He was smart to know his audience and the slide he brought up was the original Madden NFL game from 25 years ago and then a slide of the current version. The excellent point he made was that over this 25 year period this game had changed significantly. The strides that have been made are amazing especially when you see the original game which was a major breakthrough at the time compared to the live quality of the newest version. Obviously, a lot of things have combined to deliver this improvement but he asked the question about how business software has transformed or will transform over the next 25 years? What will be the innovations delivered to the market and will they be as striking in contrast as these two versions of software. This of course got me thinking about Product Lifecycle Management and what will be the major changes in the future that will allow companies to transform their process. This article will discuss some ideas on what the future of PLM looks like and how John Madden's wisdom can be applied to our space.

There have been some great articles published this week that touch on disruption in the enterprise software market. There are various theories floating around that enterprise software is due for a shakeup based on historic trends. Obviously, cloud computing has generated a lot of attention with the success of companies like Salesforce, NetSuite and Workday. Other companies like Aras have tried to disrupt the market with freemium models that also lower the cost of entry. Having worked with a wide range of companies where pricing models vary in importance my experience is that while cost is certainly a consideration; buying product lifecycle management software purely on cost criteria can be a counterproductive strategy if the justification for purchase is driven by business value. This doesn't mean you should blindly overpay for PLM software but it also doesn't mean that all products are created equal and that the least expensive one is the best choice. This article will discuss the future outlook for traditional enterprise software vendors and how pricing models impact or should impact buyer's decisions when it comes to selecting PLM.