COFES 2010: Clouds, ashes and the future

COFES is always interesting (I’ve only been twice, so “always” is a relative term). Get 200-300 CAD/CAM/CAE/PDM/PLM people together at a resort in the Arizona desert for 3 days. Set up a few ballroom speeches and a lot of informal discussion sessions in the resort’s suites living rooms. Result: 3 days of conversations, selling, contrariness, and occasional agreement. Since so much of the weekend happens in small group sessions, I can only offer my most interesting moments and am sure there are many I missed: • Mike Payne offered a short presentation titled “The Future of Mechanical CAD” on Friday afternoon. How we got to feature-based modeling, whether engineers will ever use CAD tools and the startling statistic that only 5% of people using CAD have university degrees. Mike’s future-view was that tools must be easy to use and low-cost, and that they must foster long-term storage in neutral formats such as DXF, PDF or STEP; nothing binary. But the real eye-opener in Mike’s talk was his view that we still have a “CAD problem”. I’m pretty sure that most things anyone wants to model can now be modeled and that real problem is that it’s still not well-enough integrated into the rest of the enterprise. • Perhaps tied to the comment above: COFES attendees are incredibly smart, talented industry veterans — the vast majority are over 40 (quite likely, 50). This makes me wonder what viewpoints aren’t brought up because we’re too bound by our histories and experiences. In a session on social media, for example, a table of 40/50-somethings were goggled by the comments of a COFES intern (from Lehigh University) about how he and his peers approach work, do research and look for help. For example, it would never occur to him to call the software reseller or vendor for help if he couldn’t figure out how to do something; he instant messages a friend who might know and networks his way to an answer. If that doesn’t work, he’ll look on Youtube (not Google). A vendor’s website? Only if it’s easy to find using a “support.product.com” style. Most of us older folks would do this in reverse. Youtube? • Bo Burlingham was the keynote speaker on Saturday morning. Mr. Burlingham is a columnist at Inc. magazine and has also written a number of books on how small companies succeed. He spoke about cases from his book, Small Giants, which highlighted the passion the leaders of successful enterprises have for their businesses, employees and customers. I read the book a while ago — and intend to reread it after hearing the talk — but I wonder at the lack of focus on growing a next generation of leaders within the companies profiled: what happens to the business when the people who made it a “Giant” move on? • Brad Holtz of Cyon Research and Jim Brown of TechClarity offered an update of their business sentiment survey from last year. It appears that 2009 turned out to be far worse than many predicted by mid-April last year, with 30% of the respondents reporting in 2010 that the economy had a “severe negative impact” on their business in 2009; 29%, “moderate negative impact” and 20% a “slight negative impact”. For 2010, 20% of these same respondents see the economy as having a “positive impact”, but 46% see a middling to tentative effect and only 10% see a negative impact. That’s good — it means the industry is feeling positive about the future; about 55% of respondents see a return to 2005-2007 levels by 2011-2012. • One topic that didn’t come up as often as I though it would was cloud computing. In a session on how the Apple iPad (and similar devices) would change the world of work, the delivery mechanism was seen as secondary. Tools might live on the iPad or they might be delivered via a SaaS model. The point was made that we would work where we wanted or needed to, since we’d be connected to all of our colleagues. More important was the fact that a device like the iPad would change how we approach these tasks because they would be “fun” again due to the way the iPad enables user interaction. It was an interesting discussion, but I’m not convinced. We need to re-imagine how we do things to take advantage of the new technology; simply sticking an old-style word-processing tool on a new platform really doesn’t change anything. • The ash cloud over Iceland stranded many of the international attendees in North America, at least for a few days. The engineering software crowd came through with invitations to private homes and ideas for travel alternatives. But it also came to the overall conclusion that we are humbled by the Earth’s ability to show us who is boss (hint: not us). A very good group of people to know. There wasn’t much talk of the future (as in “further out that 2011”) but perhaps that is to be expected when everyone at the event was still puzzling out how the global economy would shake out in 2010. I really am worried that the average age of the group is too high to be truly forward-thinking; too many of the discussions started strong and then turned into a reminiscence of a technology success or failure from the past. Perhaps next year we need a panel of bright kids (like the Lehigh student) to tell us how they want to work, with no restrictions on what is or isn’t possible today or “how we’ve always done it”. The oldsters take notes like crazy and then rush back to their teams to get cracking on the 2015 version of their products, Brad Holtz and his COFES staff did a wonderful job of organizing the event. Many thanks to them for an enjoyable, entertaining and fruitful time.