3D printing: A litmus test for IT leadership

A popular notion in strategic-planning circles is “core competency,” consultant-speak for “what the company is good at.” Paying attention to what you’re good at is sensible enough. After all, when competing for business, selling something you’re good at making is a whole lot easier than selling something you’re just figuring out.

Take core competency too far, however, and you’ll find yourself “fighting the last war” because that’s the war you know how to fight, even though the war you know how to fight is trench warfare while your competitors have figured out the tank.

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Regular readers of Advice Line will recall an argument made here many times in one form or another, namely that in business, mass production is the last war. The next business war will be based on “craft production” — your company’s ability to deliver customized, feature-rich products and services. That’s the coming conflict: to deliver what, in my consulting company at least, we call “excellence,” as opposed to a few million identical, low-unit-cost items with a low defect rate (what “quality” means).

Now the Economist has joined in, adding a nifty wrinkle to the conversation: so-called 3D printing and its logical consequences.

The promise of 3D printing

In case you missed it, 3D printers are devices that output solid objects in response to information sent by a computer in very much the same way 2D printers output formatted pages. The connection is, I trust, clear: 3D printers can create a stream of unique, tailored objects just as 2D printers can create a stream of unique, tailored pages.

The potential impact goes far beyond how companies manufacture objects, too. As 3D printers drop in price and become more widespread, the decision of which objects to manufacture will become more interesting as well. In many instances, “manufacturing” will stop with the data stream companies send to their customers’ 3D printer; customers will use this data and their 3D printers to manufacture the objects themselves.

At least, for simple products — ones that require no more assembly than you might expect for products available at Ikea. For more complex products, like automobiles, manufacturers will still put them together, I imagine, although the burden of manufacturing some of the parts might shift.

How 3D printing will change craft production

3D printing will change some, but not all, of the fundamental trade-offs that separate mass production from craft production: Mass production will still have high fixed and low incremental costs; craft production will still have low fixed costs, but — and this is a big change — 3D-printing-enabled craft production will have much lower incremental costs than craft production does now. They’ll be lower because 3D printing requires no human intervention once the design is complete; they’ll be lower still because the cost of distribution will be trivial — shipping and handling will consist of a download.

Mass production will still have longer cycle times and higher throughput than craft production, just as high-speed offset presses have longer cycle times but higher throughput than your average office copier. No change there.

Something else that will change: Without 3D printing, craft production has lower quality (more defects) than mass production for all the obvious reasons. With 3D printing, craft production will still have lower quality than mass production in that design flaws will still be more likely. The investment needed to track down design defects is a lot lower when you’re spreading it over a few million items than when you’re spreading it over just one unique one. But craft production will have no more manufacturing defects than mass production — maybe fewer because items created on 3D printers will have few or no assembly steps in which mistakes can occur.

Of course, the fundamental difference, the point of craft production, won’t change at all. It will still deliver excellence, just as it has since Rembrandt’s day. But there’s a major distinction: When Rembrandt painted one of his masterpieces, it was the only one of its kind. With 3D printing, buying an item once and having as many to use or resell as you like will be no more difficult than pirating a digital movie.

If you’re interested in the macroeconomic impact of all this, read the feature in the Economist. Or if you’d like a more entertaining (although somewhat dated in style) account, get a copy of George O. Smith’s 1950s-vintage “Complete Venus Equilateral,” which described a similar sort of technology and predicted that it would cause economic collapse, followed by gradual development of a service economy to replace the manufacturing economy it devastated.

Be the company’s early warning system for innovations

I don’t do macroeconomics here in Advice Line (I’m not qualified). Instead, let’s look at the impact on IT organizations, not at some fuzzy date in the indefinite future, but right now and over the next couple of years.

Start with this question: Does your company have customers for whom you make custom-tailored products? If not, does it have customers who would prefer custom-tailored products to the ones they currently buy from you? Or, turning it around, do you have suppliers who should be replacing off-the-shelf components to your company with custom-tailored alternatives? If the answer to any of this is yes and this is this the first you’re hearing about 3D printing, there’s a problem: Either IT management doesn’t understand that they need to provide technology leadership to the company, or they haven’t figured out how to go about it.

Yes, technology leadership, one of IT’s most important jobs is to serve as the company’s early warning system for innovations in and around information technology that could represent threats or opportunities to the company’s competitive situation. 3D printing certainly could qualify.

One more question: Has anyone from the design or manufacturing departments approached IT to ask for advice on this subject or asked for support in implementing 3D printing? Or, for that matter, supply chain? If so, the final question to ask is, how did IT respond?

I sure hope the answer was, “You bet!” I sure hope it wasn’t, “This doesn’t conform to our standards.” Or, even worse, “This isn’t our job.”

This story, “3D printing: A litmus test for IT leadership,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bob Lewis’ Advice Line blog on InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.