Serendipity is not an accident

“Peering succeeds because it leverages self-organization—a style of production that works more effectively than hierarchical management for certain tasks.”

― Don Tapscott, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

Cloud, Analytics, Mobile, and Social (CAMS) are the tools to create a new product development process, one that fully embraces on-demand capabilities and the re-imagining and re-energizing of product design and engineering. We are witnessing the early stages of a revolution. Thirty years ago people were excited by what personal computers could accomplish, but few could have guessed how widespread the revolution would be. Product data management is at the beginning of a similar revolution.

Collaborative workspaces are the new frontier in product development. It is not a formal collaboration style that says: “I did my work, now you do yours.” But instead, it is a new way of working with technology that allows every person to participate when their input can benefit the most and when interaction can be a synergistic force. The key is sharing. Every bit of information about the product needs to be sharable at any state in the process. Anything less is an annoyance and a barrier to productivity.

The word “serendipity” comes from a fairy tale about three princes from a land called Serendip. They were seen as lucky bumblers who somehow tripped onto great discoveries. The moral behind the story is not about happy accidents, but the state of readiness and wealth of knowledge that makes discovery possible. Today’s Princes of Serendip are those who equip themselves with technology that replaces archaic, hierarchical workflow with an empowering, sharing platform for creativity and efficiency. Today CAMS offers us the ability to create the next generation of PDM.

“I vividly remember going to Google Docs, opening a document at the same time other students were working on it, and seeing their differently colored cursors moving around the screen, typing new words and making edits in real time. It was an epiphany.”  ― Ian Lamont, Google Drive And Docs In 30 Minutes: The Unofficial Guide To Google’s Free Online Office And Storage Suite

For more on collaboration in product development,
check out “Your Guide to Next-Generation PDM” by Randall S. Newton, published by Consilia Vektor.
A copy of the complete report is available for download:
http://info.grabcad.com/Next_Gen_PDM.html