Welcome to this week’s TBT post, originally published in July 2010.
Oleg Shilovitsky's blog last week on Social PLM and PTC's recent announcement regarding Windchill SocialLink (Cool Blog by Erin Sheehan Daly from PTC btw) have me pondering the merging of social media with Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). Obviously, PTC has a strategy built around SharePoint and Oracle, Dassault and others are opting towards more open web services models. Many are starting to incorporate some of the features from tools like Facebook and LinkedIn into their interfaces. Customer Resource Management (CRM) systems have been a little further out there when it comes to embracing social media. Given the customer facing nature of CRM it makes sense that they would be incorporating some of the features from products like Facebook into their systems. At Zero Wait-State we were an early adopter of Salesforce.com. They recently released a new user interface called Chatter that takes the blending of CRM and social media to a new level. This blog will highlight some of these features and how they might apply to PLM. I will also share my thoughts on how PLM tools can make best use of the current trends in social media to improve collaboration and adoption of PLM solutions.
We will start out with one of the more antiquated forms of communication in these days of instant messaging and texting, the email. Email still remains a mainstay of communication for most product development organizations. Unfortunately, it is ad hoc and unless you are particularly organized this type of communication can easily be deleted. Microsoft's tools for capturing email via SharePoint aren't bad but most PLM tools require that you convert the email to html and then link it as an attachment. CRM tools like Salesforce.com offer syncing tools with Microsoft that allow you to map like to like from email contacts to CRM contacts and attach emails based on matches. You can also go in and manually identify an email for attachment. All of this can be done with an Outlook plug-in and does not require you to be in the CRM. Obviously in a PLM system the objects you are attaching to are different. You don't have the same contact management paradigm but the mechanics of putting an email into PLM should be much easier than they are. Some PLM systems may do a better job at this but the ones I have observed directly make this process quite involved.
It's time to get a little more exotic. Chatter is in Salesforce.com marketing jargon "A brand-new way to collaborate with people at work. Where the status of important projects and deals are automatically pushed to you — so you're always in the loop." Most PLM tools have the ability to subscribe to an object or a project. Chatter takes things to a different level. It gives you similar capabilities to Facebook but inside the CRM. You can provide status updates. You can follow projects or contacts. You can even subscribe to outside feeds from Facebook and Twitter that are relevant to your work items. I suspect that Chatter is very similar to SocialLink from PTC except that unlike PTC Salesforce.com rolls it in as a general interface to their product. PTC should consider making this part of their core functionality and using it as a differentiator.
This quote from the Salesforce.com Chatter page illustrates one of the flaws in vendor's strategy for leveraging social media in enterprise software. "And because Chatter is an internal tool, this feature goes only one way: You don't have to worry about anything from Chatter going back out to social media sites." I think the case can be made for sharing information out of CRM and PLM into social media sites. In my situation, a limited number of people in my company use Salesforce.com. So, if I want to share information out to others from Salesforce.com I am stymied. I have all this cool collaboration capability but no way to reach anyone outside the system. It's like one hand clapping. This is the problem with just taking social media user interface elements and incorporating them into PLM or CRM. It's nice but the true power of social media is being able to extend the PLM or CRM into your social network. Security concerns are legitimate but there are ways to segregate content and make sure that the appropriate information is shared. I suspect the motivation for restricting content is more about driving revenue for the vendors than protecting client information. So, the lesson learned from CRM and Chatter is that incorporating social media features into CRM and PLM is nice but unless you enable the ability to externalize content its really more style than substance. If you don't have a license to access the software, "No soup for you!".
[Edit: repost from 2010]
