I’ve been enjoying very much Franco Folini’s posts on the NOVEDGE blog. This one about the never-ending transition from 2D to 3D really caught my eye. In it, Folini seems to suggest that the 3D revolution has been undermined — or at least delayed — by a sort of personal neo-Luddism among designers for whom missteps and mistakes can be hidden in the “dumb” lines of 2D drawings but which are patently obvious to any educated observer in 3D systems.
While I understand the powerful urge to avoid professional embarrassment, I don’t think this is the underlying reason for the delay, if in fact there is a delay as contrasted to late-adopter syndrome.
Allow me to suggest another possibility.
Could it be that in many manufacturers (AEC’s resistance to 3D is another topic completely) that 3D hasn’t delivered enough value beyond engineering productivity to the business? If that’s the case, neo-Luddite behaviors could override the business imperative.
But if 3D product information is everyware…and 2D and 3D deliverables are created from a high-productivity, easy-to-implement, PLM-non-partisan technology, wouldn’t that force the issue?
I mean at the end of the day, we all like to cover up our inadequacies, but if the boss says, “You will deliver information the service folks and the manufacturing process people can use directly,” you’d do it, right?
It’s just as simple as that: as long as the engineers can stop progress because of internal concerns, CAD remains just “that thing over there” in the enterprise IT mindset. But, the instant that data is leveraged, business considerations will have engineers saying, “Me Love 3D Long Time.”
One other thing that may be limiting the adoption of 3D authoring tools is that the value proposition has been focused too much on the company that uses them and not enough on the individual user. It has to be a wise investment of the users time to learn how to do things in 3D as well as the company’s money. If the user knows they will get their job done faster, produce higher quality results, get paid more, get promoted quicker or get to work on more interesting projects then I think there would be better adoption. There has to be a carrot and a stick.
Chris, I am not sure I agree.
Without sounding too harsh, it’s not up to the user to decide the tools that best deliver productivity. While that kind of individualism is noble, it’s impractical. Business have one PBX, right?
So it makes sense to me that if a business has both a need for 3D (and who doesn’t?) and recalcitrant users, the latter has to give way to the former.
After all, personal choice is about private activity. In the business world, catering to those choices — no matter how creative the individuals involved are — is largely impractical.
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I guess I do tend to believe in the power of the meritocracy a bit too much. That being said, I guess that companies and users shouldn’t give up on finding a solution that gives users and companies what they want. It doesn’t has to be one or the other. To extend your PBX analogy: while all companies have one PBX, there are a lot of different models of phones that can be plugged in to it for your desk.
One of the stumbling blocks I as a 3D sales person have discovered is fear. I know this may sound a little far fetched, however many small business owners fear having to train their staff in 3D applications purely for financial reasons. One they may have to pay their staff more money for gaining this knowledge and two they may lose them to other firms who are using 3D programs.
Once the staff member becomes proficient in the 3D product, projects that where taking them three weeks can now be taking them three to four days, great right? Not so, the expense of both software and hardware upgrades, coupled with the training and learning curve of staff members (equaling down time) is sometimes a daunting task.
The fault comes in implementation and integration. Most company look at cross grading all their current seats of 2D to 3D products in one go. It’s not a rational or effective management decision. There needs to be a ramp up period, a learning period if you like and this needs to be done in stages to minimize the learning curve blues.