Legal & Ethical Implications of PLM

There are actually quite a few fascinating legal and ethical implications surrounding the practice construct for PLM. The reason for this is simple; Program Management Offices (PMOs) are the places which control funding, contracts and oversight for almost all IT projects and many other types of projects as well. Thus, PMOs by nature are the organizations charged with managing legal or liability issues. Liability issues encompass a wide spectrum of topics including, but not limited to:

• Financial liability due to non-performance
• Financial liability due to negligence
• Legal liability due to contract disputes
• Legal liability due to product failure or non-compliance
• Legal liability due to security breaches, information privacy failure
• Legal liability due to information freedom of speech related issues

Because of these and other related issues, PMOs are the places charged with supporting or conducting risk management or risk assurance processes. These processes though are only as effective as the data which support them. Risk Management is one of the sub-processes supported by the PLM “meta-process,” the idea being that all risks are related to tangible requirements and all requirements are then related to projects, programs and portfolios. So, PLM is both an enabling technology as well as a way to help place issues in their proper context within the larger enterprise picture. Given its focus, there could be potentially significant liability issues associated with PLM as a solution.

IT and ethics are generally not discussed in the same context. The reason for this is simple, people who work with data understand how easily it can be manipulated and in many cases clients are specifically interested in seeing data manipulated to suit various agendas. The introduction of the ethics discussion can often become very uncomfortable for the many folks who aren’t aware that this is happening and this is perhaps the main reason it so seldom occurs.

The management of organizations is an extremely subjective exercise, there isn’t a clearly defined comprehensive canon of ethics per se, just specific legislation here and there to prohibit or restrict certain practices that have been found to be problematic. From a service provider perspective, the key thing to keep in mind for PLM is that any set of decisions will be better served if the right data is available to the right stakeholders at the right time. Ultimately, the folks running the ePMO will determine the rules that focus on issues and data important to them. If an organization chooses to ignore critical data or attempt to change the nature of data provided to them then that clearly falls outside of the boundaries of liability for the PLM service provider.

Copyright 2008, Semantech Inc.