January 10, 2011
The Intersection of Engineering IT and the Cloud
Seems nowadays its hard to read about engineering IT without coming across something about the cloud. And while it's definitely an interesting concept, it hasn't necessarily been explicitly clear what advantage or value it providers to designers, engineers or analysts. With ideas of IT related issues that have plagued engineering in the past, I started to think hard about the cloud.
January 4, 2011
What is the Killer App for the Modern Engineer?
A couple weeks ago, I asked a question that has been on my mind for a while: do engineers have the broadest reach within the enterprise? I've always thought there's been a little bit of a misconception that an engineer's sole focus is on new product development and more specifically, design work. Instead, just about every day for an engineer is a firedrill where they're scrambling all over the company to resolve issues across a number of product's lifecycles. So after coming to that conclusion, I started thinking about another question: what technology would best enable engineers to do their job?
December 21, 2010
Does SharePoint Add Complexity to PLM?
It is a fast-paced and complicated world, isn't it? While we've gotten instant access to information around the world, I think it's gotten harder for each of us individually to really understand what's going on in the world. There's simply too much to register. I think that's why, in general, we like concise perspectives that distill the gist of a situation so we can come to a conclusion and move on quickly.
December 17, 2010
Is Teamwork the Key to Simulation Driven Design?
Back at the beginning of December, I published a post titled The Very Real Skillset Challenges of Simulation Drive Design. It identified four main areas of knowledge or skills needed to really make a simulation driven design initiative successful including. It also looked at some typical engineer roles and their ability to gain and keep these four types of skills or knowledge.
December 15, 2010
PDM-less PLM: Is It Pragmatic or Just Problematic?
Since PLM was first conceived, it has almost been inseparable from PDM. The majority of PLM deployments included PDM as part of the PLM deployments. However, more recently, the idea that PDM must be deployed with PLM has been eschewed. Some new PLM solutions only offer plug-ins or integrations to 3rd party PDM systems, all of which is optional. Is this a good or bad idea?
In the last post on collaboration, we covered a lot of issues surrounding collaboration. It's been overused. It's been used without specificity. As a result, we all cringe a little bit whenever we hear it being trotted out to describe another process or set of engineering software.