I just finished reading ShareVis’ white paper entitled “Full Enterprise PLM” through model-based workflow using ShareVis/SharePoint.  They’re on to something here.  As many of you know I’m a big fan of iterative and incremental development that I picked up on while at Menlo Innovations. 

I also feel very strongly about the need for knowledge workers to not have to spend an exhaustive amount of time learning whole new systems.   PLM, ERP, etc., while extremely valuable to the enterprise, can often be quite esoteric.  Knowledge workers often ONLY need a focused view of the data presented through a front-end that is familiar and focused on the “data at hand”, while others need in-depth PLM/ERP data that only PLM systems and their GUI can provide in a cost-effective manner.  Building and entire PLM system incrementally through forms and workflow on SharePoint has merit, but huge investments made in PLM should be leveraged as back-ends first.

SharePoint as a front-end to these systems makes a great deal of sense, but only if data can be fed into and out of them to populate these often disparate systems.  Workflow systems like ShareVis makes this job easy.  While one of the advantage as ShareVis states in their paper is that overall systems can be brought online incrementally, what they didn’t delve deep enough into was the human-computer interaction of such a scheme.  With users interfacing only through a familiar web browser and a familiar portal like SharePoint, they can spend more of their mental cycles on the meaning of the data, rather than the interface through which they interact with the data. 

Beyond this, the data that they are interested in, and only these data, can be presented to them.  The workflows the ShareVis paper discusses provides for what I would term “filtering to role”. 

Furthermore, at each stage of a workflow different roles need reports on the data surrounding their node of the overall workflow.  SharePoint/ShareVis helps here as well, with out of the box reporting on data available to the participant.

I see a great advantage to their methodology here, which can be widely and easily adopted by all manner of product development companies.