IPIP

I think this site/effort should be getting more buzz. Premium IT is, among other things a fantastic repository of best practices for IT organizations. The site include blogs, white papers, and trends. While it surely is a strong marketing strategy for Intel, the site is still quite valuable and really hits the mark for large IT organizations. If you haven't explored the site I recommend a visit, IPIP.

I recently had the opportunity to attend a premium IT event here in Minneapolis. Excellend sessions that layed out roadmaps for Intels next generation of processors, plus sessions on virtualization and security. What was most interesting to me was a session on Intel's efforts to implement social networking at the enterprise level. In my last post I asked whether you thought tools like twitter had a place in your design environments. The message from Intel, was a little more direct. If you want to attract talent and retain Gen Y employees it's a "must do" not a "should do".

I also suggested that you have a choice in implementation. Roll your own, or use existing tools. Intel has chosen to create their own using enterprise tools to integrate content and social media sources - twitter, facebook, and blogging features are aggregated into a very facebook like interface, but inter-connects into other data sources, groups, and team information are included as well. Recognizing that some R&D efforts must have restricted access, at least early on, they have also chosen to include permission and authentication features not common in consumer based social networking tools. 

Interesting points were made too about the need for ease-of use and the need to meet the demands of clients whose expectations for collaborative tools are derived from the consumer space and not the, can I say traditional IT space. The tools are obviously for Intel employees only, but I couldn't help notice how much the examples looked like facebook - this isn't the future of enterprise collaboration, this is what teams expect and need today to share and interact. This isn't MS SharePoint, or older file post and retrieval collaboration tools like we might be more familiar with. If your thinking a web page, or heh, ProjectWise, then maybe revisiting requirements is in order.

Design Automation Strategies

Despite having 200 downloads on this site, I really believe cad managers should be selective in the number of custom tools they deploy.  Every custom tool requires support, testing, communication, and training. And, if it's an application you created, then it also requires development. This may not be an issue when you have a small design operation of say 15 people, but start to scale your design team and costs begin to increase rapidly. 

My current team supports design and graphics technology across three key business operations with 1500 users. A little better than a quater of these use MicroStation, a few pockets use specialty product design tools like U4ia, and most use Adobe Creative Suite - Photoshop, Illustrator, and In-Design. In all, we manage an inventory of more than a hundred "packaged-off-the-shelf" design and graphics applications. This is too many applications to provide a high level of support. Imagine if we add ten customizations for each application. That would give us 1000 functional features on top of the feature set available in the base application. Some applications are more extensible than others but on average this is a good estimate for the number of additional applications we have to support.

There are many strategies we employ to manage complexities brought about by scale, but there are a couple of approaches that I think apply to both large and small organizations.

Tiers

Because of the large number applications this team manages, it's impossible to understand all functional features and support each with the same level of understanding. Our engineers are smart, but their bandwidth is limited. To account for this, we implement basic strategies for life cycle management and categorize each application based on top, mid, and bottom tier. 

Top tier applications are business critical. Without them some process within the organization can't function - like MicroStation for building construction, and In-Design for marketing promotions. The top tier applications get special attention with regard to enhancements and customization. Development trends are monitored and close relations are maintained with these software vendors. 

Mid-tier applications are less likely to receive a high-level of support, upgrades are made on a limited basis, and they are deployed "out of the box" with no customization. Bottom tier applications only get attention when the business team indicates there is a need. 

Bottom tier applications don't receive any attention at all. The business must self-support, and typically deployments involve fewer than five users. These applications, if not functional pose little if any risk to the business. 

Business Value

New applications, new hardware, and customizations are only deployed if they add value to the business. A new technology should either fill a gap allowing us to do something we've never been able to do before, or it should improve a process making us more efficient. This is usually easier to do for our engineers than it is for our creative artists - not that both don't find new ways of increasing business value, it's just that engineers are more often process focused and can frame their needs in terms of cost savings. It's difficult to prove positive net present value from artwork. Whose to say that artwork created with a larger monitor is better than the artwork made with a smaller monitor? Of course, as enablers we can focus on precision of input and ability to see more of the drawing at once allowing the designer or artist to make better decisions.  

I believe both of these strategies can and should be applied to design teams of any size. Be aware of when you are implementing tools just because you can, or because they are cool. There's always a need for productivity tools, but we don't need to implement animated icons if there is no functional reason to do so.

What do you do to manage design software? Do you also have scale challenges? Also, let me know if strategy discussions are useful to you.

CAD Twitter?

Millions of people, generally younger than me understand the potential of social networking sites. I, on the other hand, am just beginning to grasp the potential. I see how the tools are used, to communicate what you are doing now, and to tell people more about your interesting life. Andre McAfee (Harvard Business School) describes in his August 15 blog post The Twit's Progress how sites like twitter and facebook  fill in the gap between physical meetings.  Professor McAfee goes on to suggests that these sites have enterprise application, which made me wonder how twitter, or twitter like tools could be applied to the design environment.

Is it possible to integrate twitter into our design work flows? And how relevant is a tool like twitter in an environment where we can reference, overlay the designs from other members on our design team? Can I get designers to use it?

Essentially, twitter lets us tell people what we're doing now and it allows us to raise points of interest. "Mark is having dinner" isn't really useful to the design team, but "Jason just made changes to front elevation" might be useful. I may not be paying attention to what Jason is doing, but if I get a message from him it may prompt me to check out the change. Jason may be more inclined to type the message if 1) it's short; 2) he doesn't have to find your email address, or 3) wait for you to accept a chat session. He just let's the network know, in this case the design team, that he is or has changed the file.

So, there seems to be some advantage to using a tool like this. Should we sign up for twitter and follow our design teammates, or can we implement our own tool to track what others are doing? With our own tool we could automate info exchange on certain actions; "Mark made changes to the second floor ductwork" could be a message sent automatically each time I make a change to that file. 

I like both ideas. The advantage of using twitter is that it's ready to go and it's free. Your design team just signs up and accepts each other's invitation to follow. The disadvantage is that anyone can see what you're working on, including your competition. Your own application would take care of this, but of course the disadvantage is that you have to build it, or at least pay for it.

What do you think? Do you think your design teams would increase collaboration if they used CAD Twitter?