PML Innovation Forum Insights: The Data-centric World Will Make Your Life Easier

That’s the Big Difference

Bertrand Sicot, Senior Vice President at Dassault Systèmes shared an important insight during the discussion at TECHNIA’s PLM Forum 2017. According to Sicot, the recently observed development is not only going to make data consumption faster and easier, it’s actually going to make life, in general, easier. He illustrates his statement in a simple example: “Take a travel boarding pass as an example. Today, your typical boarding pass is a PDF file that you’ve downloaded from an app on your phone. But if the gate for your flight changes, you actually don’t know about it by looking at your boarding pass because the document stays the same. If the same information was available in a data-centric manner, the boarding pass would change accordingly. That’s the big difference.”

Bertrand Sicot, Dassault Systèmes’s Senior Vice President (Image: Niklas Hildén)

Aside from making data more flexible, allowing for instantaneous changes to information, Sicot states that data-centrism will also impact the way we work. Massively. “Depending on who you are, you look at data in different ways. So it will democratize overall data access because it will be made available and presented to the person who needs it the way they need it. It will make businesses less hierarchical.”

Data is What Will Really Matter Tomorrow, Nothing Else

At Dassault Systèmes, this development is referred to as “After PLM”, and has laid the foundation for the company’s 3DEXPERIENCE Platform. “Data is what will really matters tomorrow, nothing else. Users will be looking for experiences, not software.” Sicot says data-centrism requires a new type of mindset of how we look at data in general, where users won’t have to worry about the underlying data providing the information, or where they need to look to find it. “If you look at the younger generations, they’re already using data in this way.

The Revolution has Already Started

The Google suite is a good example of that. The revolution has already started, and it really illustrates how these users are always connected and want instantaneous access all the time. It’s different from everything we’re used to and it will force companies to work in whole new ways.”

“In essence, it’s all about dashboarding data,” Sicot puts it in a nutshell. As for cyber-security, Sicot says data-centric information management will also act to protect valuable data better, because the ultimate responsibility will lie in the hands of the IT professionals managing the cloud-based data banks, rather than with individual users who might be more vulnerable to a virus invading his or her personal computer, or a hacking attack. The Vice President observes: “The way it works today, is not secure in comparison.”