When I was an engineer working on Technology; I was constantly updating the product record.

When I was an engineer working on Quality; I was constantly trying to drive down errors in the product record.

When I was in IT working on a PLM Roadmap; I was constantly looking for a solution to keep the product record correct.

When I worked at a large corporation on their 'state of the art systems,' I should not have had these problems, but I did. The real problem was that I was always working on siloed systems with multiple systems of record. Did you hear that.....? Multiple systems of record!

We put in the time, energy, and, maybe most of all, stress into getting the product right. We put the data in the system, we wrote checklists to make sure we got the data from the right place and from the right people, at hopefully, with some luck, the right time. We wrote code to check the data, we wrote code to pull the data. We tried building analytics to verify the data, we looked at the data with multiple eyes to reviewing it. We still got it wrong!

We wished that we only got it wrong in some other hidden place that our customers couldn't find and didn't affect the end product. Well you know what they say about wishes!

The problem is that we were working on a Product Lifecycle system that was inherently siloed. Yes, it was really good, but only if you were just in the CAD world or limited to only the NPI world, but rarely does a product end there as PLM1.0 & 2.0 did, and even there it had a lot of challenges. Want some analytics? Good luck! If we had a nickel for all the Process Extensions (aka CODE) and integrations that we had to think through, develop, code, test and deploy (and redeploy, and redeploy)...well, I think you get my point.

PLM is changing from a fighting for survival mentality, to a state of foundational evolutions built from a primordial soup, in order to perpetually chase a place of "better existence." This is now being called Protopia: The ability and foundation, to seek the better and not be held back by a solution that doesn't fit the new challenges in our changing economy. The key word there being 'foundation.'