Category

IT Strategy

Jul 15
Section perpendiculaire du moulin des Verdiers (Jean-Jacque Lequeu, 1778)

IoT: Build or Buy?

By Internet of Things (IoT), IT Strategy No Comments

Should You Build Your IoT Solution or Buy it?

Heard recently on the web: Should you build your own Internet of Things (IoT) or buy it?

As you might expect, the question (and the answer), sponsored by an IoT platform vendor, were self-serving.

Earlier today, I received a note about a research that maintains that more than a 100 new IoT “platforms” have entered the marketplace in the past 12 months alone, fueling fast growth that will exceed $1.5 billion by 2021.

Which makes no sense whatsoever.
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Jul 06
Garden of Earthly Delights Hieronymus Bosch

Agile vs. Corporate Culture

By IT Strategy, PLM 3 Comments

Agile Software Development

Those of you who practice Agile software development will surely recognize the viewpoints expressed in the following quotations:

“Particularly alarming is the seemingly unavoidable fallibility of large software, since a malfunction in an advanced hardware-software system can be a matter of life and death.”

“In design you have to start at the level of organization of programs and machines, with the design of hardware and software together.”

“Begin with skeletal coding: Rather than aiming at finished code, the 46 first coding steps should be aimed at exploring interfaces, sizes of critical modules, complexity, and adequacy of the modules … Some critical items should be checked out, preferably on the hardware if it is available.”

You may be surprised to learn that these are not brought to you from a recent Agile conference or even from the Agile Manifesto circa 2001. These comments are from a NATO software engineering conference that was held in Germany in 1968!
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Mar 18
Metamorphosis of Narcissus (Salvador Dali, 1937)

Digital Transformation and the Internet of Things

By Internet of Things (IoT), IT Strategy, PLM No Comments

The Internet of Things Enables Digital Transformation

I recently returned from a trip to Munich, Germany where I spoke at the Product Innovation Congress. In additional to the usual product innovation, PDM and PLM topics, this year’s Congress highlighted technologies, business strategies and use cases that use the Internet of Things (IoT) as a means to create a digital thread of product information to support product creation and service strategies.

As you might expect, a discussion on IoT and, in fact, any technology to drive enterprise digital transformation can generate a frustratingly wide range of definitions and, consequently, vague characterization of its benefits and economic justification.

During a panel discussion, I suggested that digital transformation isn’t simply a matter of establishing a new IoT-centric enterprise architecture. Rather, I maintain that we should look at the impact of the information and the digital thread enabled by the IoT in the context of organizational operations and decision making processes. Here is the approach I propose. You can use this to identify opportunities and assess potential value in a way akin to a maturity model. Read More

Sep 15

Unlocking the Value in PLM-ERP Integration

By IT Strategy, PLM No Comments

PLM-ERP Alignment is Critical

In the seemingly endless conversation about product development software, there are those that argue that PLM and ERP serve different roles in product development and product lifecycle management. Those on that side of the fence use arguments such as “PLM helps drive product innovation, ERP helps execute the business of manufacturing”, and prop their arguments by making debatable observations such as that ERP is a static system of record and PLM manages product changes; that product data structures in ERP are rigid whereas PLM’s are flexible; or that ERP can only handle hierarchical data relationships as opposed to the dynamic many-to-many relations data model of PLM. Some years ago there was even an attempt to restore the lackluster image of ERP by coining a new term:  “Operational ERP.” Read More