IT Spending Undertainty Grows

Higher degrees of uncertainty have to be expected in any business driven by enterprise software, enterprise hardware or consumer hardware and services, as fears of recession grow. 

Information technology spending might have grown by the end of 2022, but there are widespread fears of a slowdown, especially of capital investment, at least for 2022. But IT spending might grow in 2023, Gartner data suggests. Still, the composition of that spending will vary: more spending on software and integration and less on hardware, for example.  

source: Battery Ventures 

But all such forecasts are susceptible to any rapid changes in behavior. Impressionistically, major tech firms are prepping for lower sales and activity, suggesting that earlier forecasts are off. 

I cannot remember a recession that did not change behavior.

93% of Government Digital Transformation Efforts Fail, EY Survey Finds

Just seven percent of the 150 government leaders taking part in the  EY 2022 Tech Horizon Survey say their organization has achieved its digital transformation objectives, according to EY. That should not come as a surprise. 

Perhaps 70 percent of all digital transformation efforts, big information technology projects or efforts at change in general will fail. So failures in the public sector, which arguably has a harder time quantifying actual outcomes or controlling the inputs to drive change, is arguably at a disadvantage. 

At the level of technology, even if cloud computing, analytics, the internet of things and artificial intelligence are the tools used to create digital transformation, they generally are hard to apply in a government setting in a concrete fashion, especially if use of three or four at a time, in concert, is required to produce an outcome. 

source: EY 

Winter is Coming, Leaders are Getting Ready

KPMG’s Global CEO Outlook Report illustrates the principle that nothing in business or technology follows a straight line or a constant trajectory. And that seems especially true when the macro environment throws challenges. 

Executives who participated say that although they remain committed to “digital transformation,” they also expect to pause or reduce effort over the near term as they expect a recession to hit that will pressure their firms financially. 

source: KPMG

When leaders expect revenues to fall, attention always turns to the cost side of the business model. And even if leaders say they expect “digital transformation” (ignore the hype, just call it applied technology) to help on both revenue and cost sides of the business, the long-term goal will bend under the pressure of short-term financial stress. 

At this point, it would be a rare executive indeed--in the connectivity, software, applications or computing businesses--who is not preparing now for a recession in 2023. There could be a bright side. 

Periods of financial excess always lead to sloppy operations, thinking and execution. It can be argued that a decades-long period of zero cost of capital has led to some business decisions that will prove unwise as real costs of capital rise, and as a recession wrings weaker providers out of the market. 

Leader focus is about to shift to execution and fundamentals. Been there, done that.

Maybe the Issue is Not AIOps but Automation

Nearly 77 percent  of technology professionals see room for improvement in their data center network automation strategies and 45 percent  of organizations expect their data center network automation investments to earn a return on investment  within two years, researchers at EMA say.

Fully 90 percent indicated that AIOps-driven network automation would have value.

More than 98 percent of respondents expected to use a network automation tool. Unexpectedly, the most popular tool type were solutions designed specifically for automating cloud infrastructure, rather than data center networks. 

DevOps automation tools, integrated automation capabilities from hardware vendors, and network overlay software were all secondarily popular options for automation

Plenty of organizations included monitoring tools, network orchestration and automation (NOA) tools (sometimes known as intent-based networking), and network change and configuration management tools in their overall data center network automation strategy.

source: EMA, Juniper Networks

Why "Horseless Carriage" Tells Us Much about the Future of Metaverse

With the caveat that intentions are not outcomes, early investment in metaverse capabilities is unevenly distributed. Industrial processes are getting early investment, often in the form of digital twin platforms that allow managers to monitor complex systems in real time, as well as test “what if” scenarios. 

And we might also keep in mind that early visions of what is possible, and what will be popular and useful, often diverge from ultimate reality. Humans have a hard time envisioning futures that are based on radically-different assumptions than the present. 

The fact that early automobiles were known as "horseless carriages" illustrates the point: we imagine the future in terms of our past. Early refrigerators were known as "ice boxes," as that is the technology electrical refrigerators replaced.

The other area of early investment are content and applications, both for roughly analogous reasons: metaverse offers a potentially richer and more-realistic virtual experience.

source: McKinsey 

Many observers will point out that the metaverse is not here yet, but is going to be built over a period of time (one decade or more). The evolution will happen from current use cases and capabilities. 

The eventual metaverse will be built from today’s sensor use cases, automated control systems, applied artificial intelligence, faster processors and cheaper storage, plus more capable access and local and private networks, payment systems, specialized devices and software. 

Realtors will use digital twin technology to allow homebuyers to experience in three dimensional sense what a potential home looks like, without being there, physically inside the property.

Industrial process managers will be able to analyze data from their operating processes and machines in real time, and also use virtual replicas of those processes and machines to conduct “what if” games of the sort financial analysts began to do when the first personal computer spreadsheets were created. 

source: PwC 

Videogame players were early beneficiaries of computer-generated graphics, and will likely be among the first to see applied versions of immersive and persistent gaming. Traffic engineers might someday be able to use real-time traffic data to relieve some congestion at peak rush hours, or reroute traffic around temporary obstructions. 

Sometimes the Value of Extended Reality is the Device, not the "Reality"

So I did this, recently. The value actually had nothing to do with extended reality--artificial or virtual--but in the use of the goggles instead of a dedicated stationary appliance. In other words, the appliance moves to the human, not the human to the machine. 

This sort of thing happens quite often with new technology. A device or app is developed to solve one set of problems or provide one set of values. But then it gets used in ways not in line with that creator vision, in ways that provide value, but were not specifically imagined. 

Yes, the goggles were "better" in terms of user experience. But it was the goggles, not the software or app experience, that accounted for the increased value. 

Automation is a Good Thing, But Effectiveness Might be Better than Efficiency

Connectivity provider operations are complex, almost anyone would agree. Perhaps everyone would agree that simpler, less-complex operations are desirable. The issue is how much less complexity is optimal?

Zero touch is one possible goal: the ability to provision any service with as little friction as possible. But there are larger questions. 

One difference between wholesale and retail business models is that wholesale operations are less complex by design. Wholesalers sell only to a relatively small number of other business customers who want to use those assets to sell products directly to customers. 

The reason mobile virtual network operators exist is that their business models allow for lower-cost operations. By avoiding capital investment in networks, they can focus their spending on marketing and sales. 

Automation in various forms helps both wholesalers and retailers, of course. But if the purpose of automation is to lower operating costs, there are potential business levers to pull beyond automation as such. 

Among recent trends beyond wholesale are co-investment in facilities, joint ventures or spinning off facilities, often to private equity firms.  

Telenor, for example, has just divested 30 percent ownership of a new infrastructure company, Telenor Fiber AS.

A consortium of investors led by KKR includes Oslo Pensjonsforsikring as a co-investor.A bit unusually, the new fiber company’s sole customer will be Telenor. Most other wholesale entities want to be able to sell access services and capacity to all comers. 

The motivations for such asset sales often include raising cash for other purposes such as reducing debt or reducing the expected cost of new infrastructure. 

All such deals, however implicitly, do raise questions about the value of access infrastructure assets. Such assets are an essential feature of modern computing and application usage. Less clear is the strategic value of digital infrastructure ownership. Mobile towers provide an essential function, but no longer are universally viewed as “must own” contributors to business value. 

Many mobile operators have concluded they can acquire radio sites as an operating cost, rather than investing capital in owned networks and facilities. Some fixed network operators seem to be concluding that full ownership of access networks is not necessary. 

In other markets, such as Malaysia, structural separation (retail mobile operators lease network services from a third party) might be acceptable, but with mobile operators also owning portions of that asset. 

More automation of operations--for both wholesale or retail operations--obviously is a good thing to the extent that it lowers operating costs and boosts customer satisfaction. But more automation is an example of the distinction between efficiency and effectiveness. “Efficiency” means doing what you do with less cost and overhead. “Effectiveness” means doing things that matter. 

Automation, ostensibly a matter of efficiency, also can raise questions of effectiveness. Where does greater value lie: automating present practices or automating different processes. In the past, we used to describe such choices as “digitizing your business practices without redesigning them.” The often preferable option was to change business practices using new technology. 

Choices to automate often should also include a deeper examination of what needs to be done, and why. Perhaps the greater value comes from reimagining what has to be done, and by whom.