IT Job Outlook Is Improving

If your internet connection seems slow, don’t blame the internet. It’s you. Or to put it more precisely, it’s the equipment in your house, or the service plan you have or the way your home connects to the broader internet network. Or all three.

Millions of people are teleconferencing for work or school. We’re streaming more movies and You Tube videos than ever before; so many that in Europe Netflix, Google, Disney and Amazon have throttled back their picture quality to conserve bandwidth.

Zoom, perhaps the most widely used video conferencing service, has seen its usage – excuse the expression – zoom. At the end of 2019, the company had 10 million daily users. At the end of March it had 200 million, which has exposed flaws, bugs and security issues.

Now not mostly just for business meetings, schools have embraced Zoom to hold online classes. Families and friends are logging on to socialize and to play games, many now being designed specifically for the service.

A New York Times analysis suggests that with nearly all sporting events cancelled – marble racing an exception – gaming sites are seeing double digit increases. Gaming of all kinds across all platforms soared by 75% as of March 19, according to Statista.

All this gaming and video usage is placing a strain on the internet. While the broader network is handling the load, most local connections were not built to handle the demand. Where business centers have typically been upgraded with high speed, high bandwidth fiber, residential areas are most often connected over cable.

Cable was designed to deliver video, not upload it, so video conferencing from home – as most of us are now doing – is fraught with dropped connections and jerky video. This gets worse as more and more users are online at the same time.

In areas that have been upgraded, slowdowns are more likely to be the result of your equipment or how much bandwidth you’re paying for. Before everyone was home and online at the same time, basic internet service and equipment may have only rarely caused slowdowns. Older WiFi equipment was not designed to handle multiple simultaneous video or gaming users.

“Still, despite these niggles, the internet seems to be doing just fine,” says the MIT Technology Review . “Health checks from RIPE and Ookla, two organizations that monitor connection speeds around the world, show minor slowdowns but little change overall.”

“In fact,” notes the article, “Far from bringing networks to their knees, covid-19 is driving the most rapid expansion in years.”

The article explains that streaming and gaming services are adding capacity, while last mile providers like Comcast and AT&T are experimenting with changes to their plans and are looking at how to upgrade the cables and wires that bring internet service into our homes. Comcast lifted data caps for two months.

“Some of these measures may be undone when the crisis is over, but others will outlive it. Once cut, red tape is hard to stick back together.”

Photo by Thomas Jensen on Unsplash

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Before the coronavirus crisis, digital priorities were so much at the top of organizational priorities that “digital transformation” had achieved the status of business buzzword.

IT departments were busy with initiatives to, as Salesforce once explained, “create new — or modify existing — business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market requirements.”

Despite the high visibility businesses gave to digital transformation, the process was slow. CIO.com says, “Most organizations aren’t the digital entities they seek to be.”

“Experts say organizations and their teams need to think of transformation not as a program or project with a start or end date, but rather a new way of operating,” says CIO.com in an article the website for tech leaders entitled “Does digital transformation ever end?”

Jeff Thomas, CTO and acting co-CIO of Sentara Healthcare, offers an answer, “I don’t think the journey ends.”

His view is reflected in the findings of multiple surveys all echoing similar results: Corporate leaders declare themselves fully invested in digital transformation, but struggle to achieve the success they are looking for.

PwC provided an explanation of why. In 2020 Global Digital IQ, PwC said that of the 2,380 executives it surveyed around the world it “discovered a group of companies that consistently generate payback and get significant value on their digital investments in every area we assess — from growth and profits to innovation, customer experience, people and more.”

Those companies – 5% of the companies surveyed – succeed because, PwC says, “Transformation never ends… Their cultural DNA empowers them to navigate change and be prepared for anything.”

“Digital is their corporate strategy, not a line item or ‘special effort’.”

Commenting on the report, PwC Global Chief Experience Officer David Clarke tells CIO.com writer Mary K. Pratt, “We look at companies doing well and find that they’re committed to constant change… Digital transformation is more of a DNA thing, it’s more of how you operate, it’s the idea that you’ll never be finished, because you never know what the next great idea or technology will be.”

While the entire C-suite needs to be committed to digital transformation, “the CIO is the person best suited to take that on,” maintains Arthur M. Langer, academic director of the Executive MS in Tech Management program at Columbia University.

“Successful CIOs are not only focused on the technology but also on the strategy and how to work with the business units to assimilate new ways in which people will work, how they use technologies, how to predict obsolescence of products and how to advise boards.”

As companies slowly reopen their doors and initiatives put on hold during the pandemic are revisited, successful digital transformation will come not from successive major projects, but from small steps.

“Change fatigue is very real,” Trent Mayberry, chief digital officer at UST Global tells CIO.com. “The idea that I’m going to do Program A and then B and then C and I’m never going to stop that change, then that’s exhausting.”

Instead, “Build an organization that can change incrementally every day, where every day you’re getting better. That’s how business should work, where transformation is constant minor degrees of change.”

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

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