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by Eric Marks, Contributing Editor   It's time we explored the role of PLM in designing for agility. What does agility mean to a manufacturing organization and what role does PLM play in achieving it? In today's IT world, agility is often tied to initiatives such as service-oriented architecture (SOA), utility and on-demand computing, and related architecture and platform solutions. It is one of those "motherhood and apple pie" words used in every speech and annual report, yet rarely articulated as a set of crisp tactics. How can it be operationalized to have meaning at a granular enough level that it can be achieved using business and IT strategies? What the heck is agility anyway? Some think of it as the ability to quickly respond to a stimulus -- either a threat or an opportunity. Some evaluate agility by the range of responses available given the need to react or change. So, if an organization is not agile and it wants to be, how does it get there? What are the baseline measures or conditions that are used to evaluate whether it achieved "agility" when the process is ostensibly complete? This is the hard part of agility: the operationalization of the term and the ability to measure it. [Click to continue] |