JUNE - 2018ENTERPRISE SECURITY| | 19These transformations provide the visibility, connectivity, and traceability that are crucial to innovation, but striving toward them is almost always disruptive. This is because product innovation platforms also include new uses of information technology (IT) to update key, and often previously disconnected, digital enterprise structures. What's most important is choosing sound PLM strategies to power up innovation. Without PLM, the opportunities inherent in full digitalization of the enterprise cannot and will not happen. Digitalization is upending long-established enterprises, forcing changes to business units, and disrupting settled workplace cultures. In CIMdata's consulting experience, many clients find that even their perception of technological change itself is altered by digitalization and PLM-enabling product innovation platforms. PLM is essential to seizing digitalization's opportunities. How do we know? Because in many ways, we, meaning PLM professionals--users, developers, consultants--were here first. The digital tools that originally enabled the product lifecycle constituted digitalization's first wave. To succeed with these strategies and the transformations they bring, we must think and act in new ways. For many enterprises, however, digitalization has bogged down. Restarting requires fostering a deeper understanding of PLM's critical role in completing an enterprise's digital transformation. In the form of innovation platforms, digitalization will be at the heart of tomorrow's economy. So, we need to figure out how to make the most out of the data. Workers' and managers' skills, the processes they use (and misuse), and their technology tools all need to transform. Product innovation platforms can do much to fulfill the hoped-for opportunities in digitalization--but only if we continually rethink how we define and enable PLM. PLM positioning, platform strategies, solution offerings, and skill sets all have to change to some extent. Otherwise, the end-to-end visibility, connectivity, and traceability required to conceive and deliver innovative products and services in the rapidly evolving digital world will atrophy and other enterprises will thrive instead. If information and its management are the heart of tomorrow's enterprises, then congestive heart failure is a real risk. The march of technology, digital transformations included, is widely recognized as both unstoppable and incomprehensible. Today, we see only the beginnings of the holistic connectivity that will be required of us--and that will be imposed on us if we don't adopt it willingly. ES
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