Social Computing Plus Product Development
Facebook Meets CAD? Not Exactly...
Today, more than ever, new technologies and the movements that go with them seem to become ubiquitous in a flash. Take social networking. It’s difficult to remember a time when there wasn’t at least one mention of MySpace, Facebook or Twitter either in the news, in a chat with friends or even at the dinner table. And whether you’ve just heard about it during water cooler conversation, or like so many other people you’ve begun encountering long-lost high school friends online, your life has been affected by computer and Internet-enabled social networking.
You may have wondered, as we have, how and when this universe of seamless, multi-user communication might affect the work you do. The answer is clear and present: it’s already happening. Today, the changing needs for collaboration have collided with the technological advances of the Internet, and social computing is poised to have a profound impact on product development. The result—simply dubbed social product development —will allow teams to better collaborate across borders and time zones and will enable innovation of endless possibilities.
This enhanced collaboration is being spurred on mainly by two factors that are affecting your industry and so many others: changing demographics and globalization.
Why Now?
Social product development is having its advent now due to two principal factors. The first is the demographic shift in the workforce. The senior side of our workforce is aging, and while this is no surprise, it’s crucial to recognize the serious implications that it can have on your knowledgebase. Right now, there is an urgent need to capture decades of valuable intellectual property before senior staff retires. At the same time, the incoming workforce of the next decade, who are at the moment somewhere between sixth grade and their senior year of college, embodies a new standard of technology literacy. These vanguards will usher in a new way of working and collaborating, undoubtedly influenced by their prolific use of social networking tools and Web 2.0 technologies. Businesses would do well to embrace this inevitability, and not shy away from it. Not only do you need to prepare for it, but you need to determine the best way to facilitate the eventual digital "meeting of the minds."
The second and perhaps more visible factor is the inexorable global expansion of product development. As a complex set of activities involving a global roster of players, product development success has become a factor of how adept companies are at choreographing the collective efforts of a fragmented team. With social networking advances, we are presently experiencing a shift from the traditional, unidirectional "push" mentality of the Internet, to a "peer, publish, pull" mentality. When you combine this freer flow of information with anytime/anywhere interpersonal connectivity, you’ll see the disparate machinations of your global team working in greater harmony.
How?
Clearly, we’re not asserting that Facebook and MySpace are the wave of product development’s future. So what’s behind this revolution, technology-wise? Social product development is being propelled by infrastructure platforms like Windows SharePoint, through which Microsoft is enabling social tools that can have a real and monetizable impact in commercial settings. Simply put, Windows SharePoint represents a set of industrialized, secure, business-ready social technologies touted by Microsoft as "social computing." Social product development is the result of these capabilities being applied in a product development setting for serious economic and business benefits.
The combination of social computing technologies into a tightly woven, easy-to-use platform for product development provides disparate team members with unique and productive ways to share experiences, exchange information and move the business forward. What happens is simple yet profound: the evolution of ideas into profitable products.
For companies of all sizes, in all industries, the promise of social computing is great. And, without fail, the manufacturing workforce will replenish, technology will advance and users will continually look to make their work lives easier. Now is the time to get acquainted with the vision for pioneering and supporting social product development today and tomorrow.
PTC’s technology for social product development extends the social computing capabilities of Windows SharePoint Services by adding structured data management and rich interaction with authoring and viewing solutions.
PTC enables companies to join the revolution of social product development through its suite of Windows SharePoint—enabled products, including, Windchill ProductPoint, Pro/ENGINEER, Mathcad and ProductView. For more information on PTC, visit www.ptc.com, or join the discussion at: www.ptc.com/go/social.