What About Product Lifecycle Management?

Product Lifecycle Management is a relatively new discipline for IT although it has been around for decades in the manufacturing arena. The product focus tends to be a narrow view, not taking in account any factors outside of the context of the product being managed. There is no ‘enterprise’ in this perspective. However within that product view the depth of insight is generally much greater as the goal of this process is the successful design and development of new products. Not surprisingly, this discipline is highly dependent upon detailed requirements data.

PLM views every system, every datacenter component, every SOA service as a product to some extent. Each of these elements has its own unique lifecycle and configuration and all of the information now is tracked used a variety of different tools and processes. For example, system configurations are often tracked using asset management tools or configuration management software such as Microsoft’s System Management Server. There are quite a few software products now that manage SOA service configurations rule or governance. PLM is premised that all of those approaches can to a certain extent be combined.

Copyright 2008, Semantech Inc.