Product Lifecycle Management (PLM).  It certainly sounds pretty dry when you think about it.  A great many compelling discussions have centered simply on the terminology of PLM and what it represents: is it a bad word, does it have an image problem, is the definition muddled in jargon or just plain variable?  Yes, probably.

What’s in a name?  That which we call PLM by any other name would deliver ROI as sweet?  Not so fast, Shakespeare.

Problem the first:  most people haven’t the faintest inkling what PLM is about – it’s too obscure.  I always enjoy the moment I start talking about PLM to an otherwise unsuspecting individual… you get that famously vacant, confused look.  Similar to the look your dog gets when you put him on the phone.  It seems simple enough… Product Lifecycle Management, you know managing a product over its lifecycle.  But then you get into finer arguments over what constitutes a product, the totality of a lifecycle, and management is well, management.  Only once you start describing a consistent thread of information to tie together all the assets and artifacts created in definition and support of a designed item do you start to replace the confused phone dog with a more sensible expression.  Evidence of this identity deficiency is everywhere – there are seven hundred billion definitions over what PLM is, might be or should be.  And unfortunately most of those definitions are not particularly compact, replete with industry jargon, or readily translatable to the non-technically inclined.  The existence of the term as an acronym is itself somewhat of an issue.  Think about the concept of cloud – we could call it application service provisioning over a distributed computing network or by any of the specific flavors like IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, or NaaS but that threatens to bring back phone dog.  Cloud is what works when attempting to communicate the general idea in a compact manner.  PLM is lacking that attractive hook.

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