Get Savvy about PLM

I watched Charlie Rose last night as he met with Leo Apothekar, co-CEO of SAP AG, and Andrew Mcaffee of Harvard Business School as they discussed the state of affairs with the economy and IT. Mr. Apothekar at the end of the discussion stated that in today’s economy there are two behaviors in IT: Now or Never. That companies recognize that either they must invest now in the process factories (his description of the enterprise applications) for efficiencies or they risk not surviving.

Some of the key points they discussed that I found very pertinent are that:

1) the Lack of Integrations of systems has been an Achilles heel to the IT industry. This was most clearly brought out in the examination of the intelligence community after 9/11 and in today’s banking situation. Too many systems and too isolated systems have led to breakdowns in critical functions. The good news is that more and more of the enterprise applications have been making the access to the data structures simpler and thus easier to build integrations.

2) the need for flexibility to foster use. As Andrew Mcaffee stated it was once thought that to get a good outcome you had to tightly control the process, yet wiki and open source show us that the organic controls are working.

3) the connectivity inside, outside and across boundaries is through process. Leo Apothekar gave a very visual description of this environment. To add to his words I’d suggest you take a look at code swarm Code Swarm videos give a very good sense of the complexities and interactions of product development (for code) – after watching it – just imagine the interactions that include electrical and mechanical design, not just software – and you begin to get a sense of how crucial access, vaulting, and change management are across both the internal and external enterprise.

4) the emergence of “cloud” computing for the enterprise. The use of the internet or the “space out there” as the environment for the enterprise operations.

In their discussion they covered other topics such as the challenges of employee retention and the viability of open source for the enterprise. I’m pleased that Charlie Rose programming posts the replays on their website, since he is on so very late at night.