Forrester interviewed users, vendors, and systems integrators operating in financial services, telecom, and other services industries to research the common principles behind leading methods for the collaborative management of product information where the "product" is not a manufactured good. We identified product life-cycle management (PLM) best practices in four areas: 1) keeping the program manageable; 2) externalizing product data into a common repository; 3) driving more collaboration across the development process; and 4) integrating to downstream applications.