Cover story: Exploiting the social network

The apparently unstoppable rise of social media has been amongst the dominant themes of the early 21st Century so far. In a mere handful of years, Facebook, Twitter and other online communication methods have gone from being the preserve of those 'in the know' to being global phenomena. It is now as normal for people to start the day by checking Facebook or Twitter as once it was to open their mail. Given the ubiquity and familiarity of these technologies, then, it is hardly surprising that there should be attempts to harness the power of social media platforms in the world of product design and development. The potential benefits of such platforms in this context seem clear. The ability to allow engineers, project managers, and other product-development professionals to reach out to a broader network to gain knowledge and form new interest groups or communities has been a key ambition for product developers for years. So could social media be the key? The leading engineering software companies clearly believe so, as many of them have developed or are developing products to meet this need. Although new to mechanical design, collaborative design is well-established in the software industry. So it was that in 2008, Dassault Systèmes, for instance, developed and deployed 3DSwYm (See what You mean) for its own needs as a global 2.0 intranet to the nearly 10,000 people that make up DS across 153 sites. From this experience, it believes that 3DSwYm can also allow its customers of any size to unleash the power of communities to collaborate and innovate much more efficiently and quickly. According to Jonathan Dutton, Automotive Online Community Strategy for Dassault Systemes: "They can simply and instantly create their own complete, on-the-cloud environments for social innovation. Employees, partners, suppliers, end-consumers and any other stakeholders become active participants in the innovation process, extending and enriching the innovation ecosystem." PTC also began talking about 'social product development' in 2008, when it introduced Windchill ProductPoint, a Microsoft Sharepoint-based solution for broadening access to product information. And, while the company recently announced its intention to stop selling Windchill ProductPoint and retire the product offering by the end of 2012, it continues to enable social product development via its Windchill SocialLink product, which rolls out later this year. Siemens, whose Teamcenter Community tool is based on the Sharepoint 2010 platform, is also making advances in this area. Eduard Marfa, the company's product definition manager Teamcenter, says the company's decision to move into this area was based in no small part on the findings of an Aberdeen Group report stating that collaboration between teams within companies was a core priority for many of its customers. He says: "We were struck by the value of building social media applications and applying them into an industrial environment to empower collaboration across departments within companies." Of course, enforcing collaboration between departments has long been a goal of PLM. However, one of the reasons Eduard Marfa believes that social media platforms have a role to play in making this process feel less imposed and more 'organic'. He says: "The use of this technology is helping a lot. The users are very comfortable with using all these tools and it's quite easy for users to chat and share information." Tom Shoemaker, PTC's vice president of product marketing says: "We had been looking at it for a variety of reasons, the first of which is the sheer popularity of those tools. I would also say that there was a demographic shift that they were looking at whereby many of the workforce in engineering or related functions is approaching retirement age and managers are looking at a way of capturing their knowledge. At the same time, they have the challenge that they'll have to recruit this whole new workforce that, at the present day, is in college or high school and is used to using these technologies." According to Shoemaker, the key concept is one of "communities of practice" whereby, people in a large organisation working on similar programmes or projects and are faced with similar challenges and problems as a result. And yet, because they are cordoned off, they simply don't know that the other person or people exist – or that there are 10 other people like them out there facing the same issues. He says: "Having a community where you could meet up with others who are working on (for instance) CFD or sheetmetal bending algorithms within an organisation – where they could sort of cross over the boundaries within the organisation or programme. That is really one of the principal things we're going for with this solution." This is also very much what Dassault is looking to achieve with 3DSwYm. Says Jonathan Dutton: "There are two main axes where 3DSwYm can change what we do today: Process Innovation and Product Innovation. 3DSwYm enables new ways to be discovered to develop products using social networks and above all, objective focused communities, as a key driver. This in turn improves and accelerates product innovation by centralising discussions and providing 360° access to all disciplines within a company and its ecosystem." The means whereby these 'communities' are created and how they interact is obviously crucial to their success. PTC offers a 'smart profile' that advertises and updates the skill sets of individuals within a company or community, allowing others to 'see' and access those who have the knowledge they need for a particular task or project. Says Tom Shoemaker: "By having a way to promote your skills, having a 'smart' profile that tells your organisation who you are and the sort of things you work on and having that profile continually updated or – at least – that it regularly suggest that it could be updated based on the type of work that it sees you doing. One of the problems with LinkedIn profiles or Facebook profiles or Twitter profiles is that you have to go in and manually update all of them. If a system can monitor your behaviour or activity and say 'I see that you've been doing a lot of work on sheetmetal parts and checking those into your data management system – perhaps the time is right to put those in as a skill that you have?" Of course, many of the principles that underlie the drive towards social media have been at the heart of PLM systems for many years, something Eduard Marfa points out that many of the functions available in these social media platforms have been at the heart of PLM for some time. "We have had bits of this for many years within the Teamcenter offering," he says. "Visual collaboration has been around for a long time and the ability to share documentation and information has been in Teamcenter for more than 10 years. What's new for us is the ability to have it in one single place and now, with the capabilities available in Sharepoint 2010, it is a much better offering." Siemens' Teamcenter Community tool is based on the Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 platform and, says Marfa, it "allows us to leverage many of the tools we had on Teamcenter already, but the latest version of Sharepoint allowed us to 'complete the story' and make a better platform for collaboration." According to Dassault's Jonathan Dutton, an organic approach to design is the single biggest change that this technology will bring to the role of the design engineer. He says: "It's all about keeping a dynamic going with people having common interests and goals within the same community… As projects progress so does the size of the team and each person's speciality. 3DSwYm's flexibility allows new people to rapidly become part of the community, part of the project – whilst allowing them to quickly learn and make contributions." Christian Barr, PTC's product marketing Director, agrees that this 'organic' model offers the most exciting possibilities in terms of design, saying: "There are two ways to implement it. A structured, governance-orientated approach to defining what the relevant communities would be and working it out from a project or product point of view. But I think that the more interesting ones are the organic communities that grow up whereby you have your profiles enhanced and offers suggestions to a community of practice. It becomes a community-run activity rather than a top-down thing whereby the community is dictated as being for one purpose and one purpose only." Barr points out there are also what he calls 'product communities', saying: "We look at the world in two ways: communities of practice that aggregate people around certain types of expertise from a professional perspective, but then there are also product communities where every team member defined as part of the product development team would have access to the community. This would play itself in terms of a conversation, an activity phase, through microblogging or various other ways of interacting. Even from a realtime problem-solving perspective in the product development, we're helping to facilitate that. So, whether you're a figuration analyst working in Windchill 95% of the time or whether you're a CAD designer in Creo/ProE, you've got a similar communication platform whereby you can connect with each other." This is all very well, of course, but there remain serious barriers to adoption. Of these, probably the most obvious is security. Not unnaturally, companies are likely to be nervous about the idea of 'sharing' sensitive design information with a large group. Such fears are apparently groundless, though. Says Tom Shoemaker: "Whether it be web-based, via desktop client or enabled for smartphone – all of that sits on a common platform that's familiar to the rest of the enterprise. So, whether this solution is exposed to everyone throughout the company or whether it is constrained to particular groups within the organisation, the customer can make those calls." Jonathan Dutton agrees that the ability to constrain the development groups means that the customer remains firmly in control of security, saying: "Today's IT infrastructure is very secure but also quite closed, thus creating a small circle of decision makers. 3DSwYm leverages the information stored in silos and provides a basis for communication around this. So, critical data is still secure, it's the conversations around this that will become open, but only to the community that the project owners have selected." Another objection, according to Shoemaker, derives from a general suspicion of social networking within companies. He says: "Getting these executives to understand that this is not Facebook, Twitter or MySpace or any other type of consumer social website where you're talking about personal activity, but are talking about a space where professional activity takes place, where productivity can be enhanced, where all sorts of processes can be accelerated." Clearly these are still early days for the use of social media for product development. None of the software companies currently has any customer applications that they are able to discuss (although PTC says it is currently trialling it with some customers). Nonetheless, it seems clear that this will be the way in which products are likely to be designed for years to come. As Tom Shoemaker puts it: "You get to a tipping point and then there's no looking back. This is something that we've monitored and we've decided to commit to it because there are real challenges here and so we've invested in the solution. I would envision that, like most technology change, it will follow a development curve whereby the early adopters are already out there and everyone else will soon follow."