A PLM-twisted mind never rests. Not even during these Xmas seasonal holidays, when everything else comes to rest. The dark Christmas days, here in the Netherlands, are the days to share with your family and with others who need your support. For a short time, we focus on being kind, charity and what matters for humanity.
Back to our purpose you might say. This year Pope Francis brought this message very aptly to his cardinals – read it here if you have not heard about it yet.
Next my PLM-twisted mind started ringing all kind of Xmas bells. The pope is talking about PLM! Instead of focusing on your business silo, your personal kingdom, we have to focus on what is the original purpose of our company, not of the individual person. Forget politics, back to the mission !
Then I realized there is a paradox within PLM. PLM is a must-have or must-do in a capitalistic world as through PLM companies can become be more competitive than others, win market share and become the market leader.
Nothing social. It is the base for survival in this global world. When your company is not funded by the government, you have to be competitive to survive. Your business needs to make enough money to keep on innovating and stay in business. This is why companies need PLM..
The paradox however is that effective PLM implementations are all based on the concept of sharing. Sharing data in the early ideation phases, through crowd-sourcing, open innovation, internal sharing with partners and potential customers. Next the development, delivery and maintenance phases of the lifecycle are all performing in an ideal way if information is shared and flowing across the value chain without being locked in silos. The current hype of IoT (Internet of Things) is about sharing data.
So to be a successful, profitable company, inside your business you need to go back to the roots of sharing (data). Interesting paradox isn’t it?
Therefore, I wish you all to have a PLM Pope in your company who will explain the mission and break down the holy houses. You need a PLM pope in your company to make sure it gets implemented successful.
I wish you all a happy and successful 2015
with a lot of sharing
p.s. Should I see a shrink for my PLM-twisted brain?
Jos Voskuil's Weblog 
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December 30, 2014 at 4:12 pm
dieterdevroomen
Hi Jos, you challenged me with this claim for a paradox. I bent and stretched my mind, but I wouldn’t see it.
Correct and sufficient data have always been important for doing business, sound processes too. PLM improves both. More specific, sharing data can be an economic transaction itself (e.g. Google selling user data), or sharing data among partners to create extra value (e.g. engineering partners).
I’ll definitely look too rigid at the matter. I might understand it better after your extra End Of Year explanation on short notice.
Dieter from the outside it might look data is available. However there is the misunderstanding that sitting on data (keeping it for your own) raises your value in the company. Or not taking care of data that is not directly necessary for your daily job, others might benefit but the information remains hidden or locked. By focusing on individual goals or departmental goals business gets blocked and is missing the overall purpose. To be explained soon – cheers Jos
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