1.2. The Digital Thread
I'm going to show you the digital thread by following one single change through your whole company — and you'll see exactly where it usually gets lost. Let's define it in one sentence, plainly. The digital thread is the connected trail that lets you answer two questions about anything in your product, at any time: why does this exist, and can we reproduce it? That's it. Not a platform. Not a product you buy. A trail of connected records — requirement, design, change, approval, baseline, evidence — linked so tightly that you can walk from any point to any other. Most companies have all of these records. What they don't have is the links. They have the dots. The thread is the line through the dots.