In Stay Sharp Episode 147, Data Fiefdoms and Cheese: An Analyst’s View of the Industry’s Blind Spots, co-hosts Juliann Grant and Jonathan Scott sit down with PLM industry analyst Christine Longwell. From her start as a mechanical engineer at Ford to her most recent work owning the global PLM market model for CIMdata, Christine has spent her career analyzing the business of digital engineering (DE). In this conversation, she offers her perspective on current and future use of DE platforms.
Christine Longwell, Founder, PLM Insights
Lessons From the Trenches
Christine’s first observation is that not all automation is appropriate. She credits Jonathan with articulating the idea that, “We can automate all of your processes, but it doesn’t mean we should, because you can automate a bad practice.” She adds, “Once you do automate some of these processes that are held together by duct tape and baling wire, we often find that that a different subprocess was hooked to it. And once you’ve automated that and made that better, this other thing falls apart.” While there may be hidden work to do, the benefit is exposing additional processes to be fixed or subprocesses you weren’t aware of.
She also makes the point that it’s critical to talk with customers about their challenges. Christine especially likes working with people in tech support or sales for that purpose, because you’re getting direct insight into customers’ problems and how they buy software. Part of what she’s gleaned from that work is the disconnect that exists between available software and customer needs. In particular, small- and medium-size businesses (SMBs) are misunderstood, because they’re not getting the same attention from the vendor that large customers are, and they likely don’t have time to spend with vendors or respond to surveys. She explains, “It’s really difficult to get qualified research information about them because these are people with a whole lot less resources trying to do the same thing as bigger companies. They just don’t have the time, the money, the tools, the IT support, to do some of these things.”
AI is obviously a big factor in the DE marketplace, and Christine suggests it’s caused more chaos than any other development in the last 25 years. AI hype and noise may be obscuring what’s really happening in the industry, and she believes industry analysts might be missing some of the quieter changes taking place, such as ERP and PLM convergence. She further says she wouldn’t trust anyone who claims to know where AI is going, noting, “All I can say is we are anticipating change. We should be anticipating change.”
Looking to the Future
While AI is the question on everyone’s lips, Christine sees the bigger challenge being a need for convergence and eliminating silos—just not the silos you think. “We have technical silos mostly because we have people silos,” she says. “And AI is not going to change those people silos. I think there are going to be a lot of organizations that are looking into organizational change management.”
Software vendors also need good information about the marketplace. Christine’s answer for filling the existing gap is creating independent customer research panels, as well as talking with service partners and systems integrators (SIs), like Razorleaf, who have data collected from solving a multitude of customer problems. Jonathan and Juliann agree that SIs aren’t always valued as they should be, in part because, while the software-acquisition model is changing, it’s doing so slowly. Christine says, “Even in the 2010s, the model was still that a business would pick a software and then they would find somebody to put it in.” But that approach has started to change.
One way companies can begin to make sense of the proliferation of products—as well as how to handle AI and silos—is working with a partner that isn’t exactly like the options available today. “Some smart companies are picking their services provider who can help them understand what the best and most optimal tech stack is for a business of their type and size. And then together go out and source the software to bring it in,” Christine explains. She calls this new type of partner “a reseller that has a portfolio,” and Jonathan agrees, “Not exactly a reseller, but something with a trust model.”
Learn More About an Analyst’s View of Digital Engineering
The full podcast contains more discussion and details on a variety of topics, including what a book called Who Moved My Cheese? can teach us about seeing change as an opportunity, how Christine hopes to use AI plus experience to mine existing data sets to yield information about trends in digital engineering, what’s important about “data fiefdoms,” and more.
Be sure to check out Stay Sharp Episode 147: Data Fiefdoms and Cheese: An Analyst’s View of the Industry’s Blind Spots and join us each week for a new podcast.
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