Social Tech in Product Development | 2012 3DCIC Conference

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