social tech in product development | 2012 3dcic conference
TRANSCRIPT
Social Technologies in Product Development
Chad JacksonPresident and Principal Analyst
Agenda• What are social technologies?• How can it be used in product development?• What is the value of social technologies?• How does it change product development
interactions?• Have we been down this road before?• Is anything different now?• What’s the challenge in changing collaboration?• Summary
What is social media?Social media includes web-based and mobile based technologies which are used to turn communication
into interactive dialogue between organizations, communities, and individuals.
Social media technologies take on many different forms including magazines, Internet forums, weblogs,
social blogs, microblogging, wikis, podcasts, photographs or pictures, video, rating and social
bookmarking.
What is social media?
• Ideation– Means to generate or
mature new product ideas or concepts
– Use a group to drive direction of the idea
– Referred to as “Crowdsourcing”
– Proctor & Gamble
• Detailed Design– Means to facilitate
collaboration on a product’s design
– Internal design team that could include suppliers and partners
How can it be used in PD?
• Use Cases– Any time you need to
talk to someone else while designing a product… which is a LOT
• Replaces existing tech– Email– Phone, desk or mobile– Physically tracking
someone down
How can it be used in PD?
What is the value?• Let’s start with our
personal lives• Naturally drift apart in
our personal lives… both in terms of physical distance and being busy
• Lose touch friends and family
What is the value?• We build up
professional connections throughout our lives
• Naturally drift apart in our careers… both in terms of physical distance and being busy
• Lose professional contacts
What is the value?• We have the same
issue with work• Geographically
dispersed• What are the value
added activities in the detailed design phase?
Will social media tools work?• What is the context?
– Our personal lives– Our personal network of
friends and family
• What is the objective?– Stay in touch and
communicate what’s going on in our lives
Will social media tools work?• What is the context?
– Our professional careers and work activities
– Our professional network of coworkers and peers
• What is the objective?– Stay in touch and
communicate what’s going on in our careers
Will social media work?• What is the context?
– Our design activities– Our design project peers
• What is the objective?– Resolve design issues
more quickly
• Popular social media technology will not work
Have we been down this road before?• Forums for every
object in PLM systems– Part of product
record– Never used
• Chat enabled within CAD applications– Easily accessible– Resolve CAD
issues, not design issues?
Is anything different now?• Vuuch
– Context is deliverable-centric (page for every deliverable)
– People are invited via email
– Correspond about that deliverable through many applications
– It is all tracked in a single location in the cloud
Is there anything different now?• PTC’s SocialLink
– Context is the product in the PLM system or community of practice
– People involved are those already involved with that PLM product or community
– Includes chat, wikis, microblogging, etc.
– Everything is tracked in the PLM system
Is there anything different this time?• Nuage
– Newly launched PLM-ish system
– Public accessible system, must like Facebook
– Connects are professional network
– Share and collaborate on files
– Located and accessible in the cloud
How does this change things?• Traditional efforts
trying to get a hold of someone– Try different
mediums.. phone, physically walking and finally email
• Social Technologies offer more accessible medium
Challenges in Changing Collaboration• Process change is vastly
different than collaboration change– Processes have been
documented to a great extent
– Compliance to processes can be measured
• Methods of collaboration are rarely documented… they just happen– That makes an explicit
change difficult to manage
– How do you enforce a change in collaboration methods?
Summary• The well known social media tools provide the
wrong context and objectives for work• Social technologies have an advantage over many
existing forms of collaboration today• Some attempts have been made to push these tools
in the past, in a different form, with little success• New social technologies offer capabilities that
provide the right context• Collaboration is difficult to change due to its lack of
documentation and problems with compliance
Thank You
Chad JacksonPresident and Principal Analyst