Collaboration is vital to any engineering process, but the actual mechanics of such collaboration can vary widely both in theory and in practice. Not helping at all is the fact that the term itself has been long hijacked as a piece of technical vocabulary, serving to push new products and features in a protracted marketing war including PDM, PLM, ERP, and ECM, and now CAD. When we throw “real time” in there, confusion mounts as to what exactly that is supposed to imply. More specifically what does that mean for engineering? Do engineers want it? Will it work? Morpheus might say that collaboration is everywhere. It is all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. For purely creative and/or artistic ventures collaboration can be organic, boundless. For engineering however, collaboration must necessarily be coupled with a critically important concept: change management.
On this cold winter morning, the first day of January in the year of our Email twenty-two, we stop for a collective moment to think. By common reckoning it is the year 2015, a time once thought to be so far away that email would have been little more than a memory, long supplanted by superior communications technologies wrought by the steady, unrelenting march of progress. After all, we’ve been hearing the condemnation for quite some time: email is dead some say. Or perhaps it should be dead, crushed under a wave of new socially-oriented collaboration tools. Except it’s not. Twenty two years since we started calling email by its proper name, it thrives. It is one of the few things that everyone with access to technology interacts with on a daily basis. Email is everywhere. Email is King. Kneel before email.
How we work is fundamentally changing, not just in engineering, but across all disciplines involving information management and collaboration. There’s an escalating revolution in enterprise software, where the grand unification dreams of the past are now being set aside. Spoiler alert: there really can’t be one system to rule them all. It’s not that we haven’t tried to forge the one system in the fires of Mount Doom. But in many cases we tried and failed. Instead of a single-vendor monolithic solution, there’s renewed emphasis on specialization within a larger heterogeneous mix of options. Tools in collaboration, communication, and analysis that aren’t bound to their masters like their monolithic precursors, but instead flourish in an alliance of interconnecting and distributed technology. And here we all stand, at the turn of the tide.
Out on the internets, in the fertile lands of the engineering blogosphere, a really fascinating debate has emerged about application granularity versus integration, specifically related to the Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). Are they diametrically opposed or are they complimentary? Initially sparked by Chad Jackson’s intriguing 
Despite an endless ocean of advice on what to do (and not to do) in order to avoid enterprise implementation disaster, reality is often an imperfect one. Whether it’s a failure to understand the requirements, secure solid management support, evaluate the options, or install a 
There’s just a bit of hot-dogging going on in engineering these days and engineering change is right at the center of it all. Change is often regarded as the one guaranteed constant in engineering design. So it should come as no surprise that change is also central to cost and execution. Projects that execute well, handle change well. Those that struggle, often do so under the relentless weight of compounding change. As new Computer Aided Design (CAD) technologies continually accelerate the capability to change, pressure mounts to execute as fast as the technology will allow. Friction is growing as the simple ability to make a change increasingly outpaces the ability to manage change. They have a need. A need for speed.