By Tim Young
Enterprise Product Management (a term preceded in form and function, and, for the sake of this article, used essentially interchangeably with terms like product lifecycle management and product catalog) is something that we explored in some depth in our last issue (December, 2008). In that issue, I mentioned that I had been fortunate enough to take part in a panel on EPM at TM Forum's Management World Orlando, during which I sat down with TM Forum Chairman Keith Willetts, Tribold CEO John Rainger, LTC International President and Analyst Barbara Lancaster, Stratecast Analyst Nancee Ruzicka, and Tribold's Director of Product Marketing Ernest Margitta. We discussed some of the ins and outs of EPM, and while this piece can't quite encapsulate the depth and breadth of discussion, we wanted to highlight some of the key points discussed by some of the industry's leading voices on PLM.
Willetts kicked off the discussion by asking if the move to a central product catalog was driven primarily by the business side or “as the latest techno-widget” from the CIO/CTO side. Rainger responded that “in some of the interactions [Tribold has] had, a lot of the
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“There needs to be a reference because no one wants to stick their head above the parapet first.” |
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“Which is even more true now,” Ruzicka commented, referencing the current economic client.
Willetts continued: “So if you see a player whose done it and they seem to be making enormous gains because of it, the pack will follow on very fast.” Referencing Tribold's ongoing work with Telstra, Willetts asked Margitta: “Telstra's an interesting company because it's pushing the boundaries in so
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excitement comes from the business user, in other words, the Product Marketing and Product Management set. In fact, sometimes the CIO acts as a sort of brake on that, saying ‘Whoa. This is too hard. It's too big. It's too complex.’ So sometimes you get a drag from that part of the organization and an enthusiasm from the business leaders.”
This brought up a central point that bears mentioning with any emerging technical project in the telecom space. With regards to product catalogs, Willetts remarked that his “experience in the telco industry is that [telcos] always love to see one somewhere. There needs to be a reference because no one wants to stick their head above the parapet first.”
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many things, but now your project with Telstra's three years old. Have we finally got some sort of business reference? And I don't mean just a technology implementation in which we see it there working. Have we got evidence of stunning productivity or business changes yet?”
“We definitely are seeing benefits,” Margitta responded. “ There's a great case study Telstra did about a year ago internally in which they had the number of man-days required to do a particular product change. It was an enormous number of man-days of effort, and they'd forgotten they had a product catalog that they should be using to do this. They'd
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