Stitching The Digital Thread, Creating The Product Digital Quilt 2023-01-1016

The making of a quilt is an interesting process. Historically, a quilt is a canvas of work made from old pieces of cloth cut into squares or whatever shape that make a nice connected pattern and then stitched together. The quilt could be random pieces that is not related to each other. In most recent years and more common cases, a quilt is made of different pieces of patches that are connected and laid out in a special way to tell a story. Not only does it portray a story that is put together in a certain sequence, but it also stiches the pieces of the quilt into a nice and complete narrative. A story that one can understand just by looking at the quilt spread and unfolded. Much like the making of a quilt that has a story to tell, a Product Digital Quilt will tell the story of a product.

The Digital Product Quilt replaces the conventional way of telling a product story. The traditional product story is a method that is serially connecting multiple product life cycle silos together. This process is usually error prone, difficult to understand and hard to maintain.

The Digital Product Quilt is made up of multiple pieces of the puzzle that makes a product story and the source of truth. At the center of the Product Digital Quilt is the Digital Model which represent the source of truth for the product. The first core band of the Product Digital Quilt, surrounding the Digital Model, are Requirements, Engineering, Analysis, Manufacturing, Integration and Fielding the product to the end user which includes Sustainability and Maintenance. The different pieces of the Product Digital Quilt are stitched with many different digital threads such as the System, Software, hardware and quality threads.