IT Trend for 2021: Customer-focused Digital Experience

Shopping, education, consulting, and medicine went digital in 2020. Quickly, better experiences such as Zoom stomped out less-equipped platforms such as.... well what was their names again?  Already forgotten?  Exactly.

Every company with a digital presence is under scrutiny by a couple billion online humans who are trying to navigate user interfaces.  And finally, the badly designed ones are either getting fixed, or are dying.  Welcome to the age where User Experience (UX) is king.  It's about time.

UX is bigger than a pretty UI.  It includes customer service.  In short, anything that can efficiently and effectively help the user, fosters loyalty and the bottom line.  It turns out that being good to your customer is good for business.  I'm looking at you, AT&T.

When Anti-Global Is Good Business

It turns out that communication is better when it's local. To effectively talk to your customer, you have to employ people in their region. With some luck, this will bring back jobs from off-shored call-centers. Typically, these customer service jobs require interpersonal skills. However, they also reward the knowledge of business processes, and therefore can be avenues for career growth.

 IT Trend for 2021: Your Job is Going Supernational

You think it's a melting pot now?

It's not that you won't be able to go back to the office. People will -- and some people have to.  Communication will still be easier when you're face to face. And some jobs can't be full-time remote.

But remote will be the preferred mode for programmers. The concept was tested on a wide scale and was successful. Couple that with a healthy cloud network and low-code programming, and you've got a field ripe for remote FTEs and contractors.

Note that these were possible in 2019, but in 2021 will be easy.

(1) IT Goes to the Highest Global Bidder

Even more now, the national IT shortage is fillable by global talent. This will affect our market, from educational funding to hiring practices.  This could infuse cash into developing countries directly, by paying local contractors without requiring relocation.

 

(2) Four Hour Commutes  

It's all about location location location, right?  Well, now the 15 minute commute is a luxury no more.  Now you can choose to live... elsewhere.  How about a four hour commute?  It's now less of a pain -- if you only have to go there once a quarter (or less!).  Love the job climate of Dallas, but prefer to live in friendly, hip college town Norman, Oklahoma?  Or scenic Glen Rose?  Or among the graceful piney woods in East Texas?  NO PROBLEM.

Exurbs are back, baby, and with a vengeance.

 

(3) Branch Offices

You can work near a branch office instead of the one you were assigned to pre Covid.  Want to work for USAA but don't want to work in Dallas?  Fine: move to the HQ office in San Antonio.  Doesn't matter!

A variant of this is companies establishing little satellite offices in other cities to give remote employees a quarterly gathering-place. 

 

(4) 24 Hour Commutes

Potentially, an FTE can work VERY far from an office.  As in, another country.  Prefer the coastal resort village of Zihuatanejo?  NO PROBLEM.

So your company, in many cases, could hire excellent developers from anywhere around the world.

 

(5) Managers are Also Outsourceable

Remote could also become a preferred mode for managers.  Some management may even become an outsourced business (why not?).

 IT Trend for 2021: Low-Code Tools

It's here at last: a computer system which generates genuine program code. No more bolting together pre-written modules, doctored by parameters. No more having to write the odd patch or additional program by hand. This systems accepts program and suite designs at the flowchart level and generates the code necessary to meet your needs. Exactly.

- Marketing hype from 1981.  http://www.tebbo.com/presshere/html/wf8104.htm 

Back in 1981, a computer program was released, modestly called "The Last One". It was, allegedly, the "last" computer program for business you'd ever have to buy.  This is because it would be able to automatically write the source code to any program you needed.  Just give it the specs, and it would churn out an application.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software)

Last summer, I did some reading up on "low-code" tools. These are programs which come with a pre-fabricated set of UI input and visualization elements, a straightforward way to integrate them with data schema, and hooks for defining business process flow.  Pega is one of the more prominent tools in this list, but there are a lot of them.

There's a lot of interest in these things, much more than back in the 1980s.

This is because programming is difficult. Also, increasingly, UIs are standardizing on an understood and usable set of widgets. Finally, some "digital work" is highly structured and established, such as customer service intakes (think about your doctor visit check-ins), some customer expert systems (think call centers), and some reporting.  And demand for programming is increasing.  And, to some degree, "A.I." can be of assistance, in either design or production.

Thus it makes sense to give productivity a boost by (a) giving developers tools to program some work (much) faster, and (b) potentially widening the net for who can be a programmer.

The modern versions are more sophisticated than The Last One. And frankly, I think there's a lot of business processes written in code, that is better automated than hand-curated.

I think 2021 will be a good year for these tools.

 IT Trend for 2021: A Tale of Two Clouds

Quick!  You want to get out of running server farms.  You want to get out of DR.  And there's an MBA breathing down your back to cut costs.  What do you do?

Easy!  Go to the Cloud!  Solve all your problems.

Fast Forward Two Years.  Now you connect employees, customers, third party vendors, business partners, and myriads of IOT devices together... with not one cloud, but three, four, or five different clouds.  Oh, and maybe a couple of hybrid solutions, too.  And it's frankly a big headache, perhaps worse than when you had on-prem virtual server fams in several systems talking with each other through SOAP.

And you may ask yourself: well, how did I get here?

Maybe you simply migrated existing applications, instead of writing cloud native versions. You know, to save time and money.

Maybe the companies you interface with already do things their way, with their own cloud solutions. 

Maybe you postponed governance for later. You know, to save time, and maybe money.

Maybe you postponed security considerations. 

Maybe this big multi-cloud solution is highly coupled, with low cohesion!  (Didn't we learn this lesson 30 years ago?)

When you have all those moving parts, reliability suffers.  The whole system is only as reliable as its least-reliable piece.  The human brain can't understand the whole system when the whole system is a gigantic monstrosity.  (Didn't we learn this lesson long ago?)

But actually, I think there will be TWO emerging trends here:

(1) BRAIN FIRST.  The First Cloud is Governed.  It is built up of microservices; experience-driven UIs; legacy systems; and simple, native applications.  I say simple, because they will largely be written by low-code or no-code generation systems.  In some cases, they may even be automated to some degree.  It will encompass multiple clouds, but because the effort has "governance", migration and adoption are both well-thought out.  

(2) GIT 'ER DONE.  The Second Cloud is built up of a combination of migrated applications and custom native applications, as before.  But to save up-front time and cost, governance is ineffectual.  As a result, there will be chaos and tech debt.  Since we live in a time of fast turnaround, that means the Quick Solution also turns ugly faster than it used to.  For cloud-engineer contractors who love creating order from chaos, this will be a good time.

Other Results of Effective Governance

In brief.

• cost control
• data protection and privacy
• future proofing

 IT Trend for 2021: China retreats to Statism

"Politics Come First" (with Chinese energy policies).

Jack Ma, China's wealthiest man, offered parts of Ant to the Chinese government (as if they couldn't just take what they wanted already). 

Mr. Xi doesn't trust the private sector -- and with good reason: by definition it's not communist.  So, he is increasing the communist party's presence in businesses.  Thus the Party decides... whatever it wants to. When and what to produce, what to pay workers, and what to charge people for the stuff they make. That's the endgame, anyway.

We already know communism in general, and Chinese communism as an example, doesn't believe in inalienable rights. Now we see that, by corollary, they also don't like the very market forces which shaped their growth explosion.

As you can already guess, I think this will affect IT.  For one thing, investing in China as a tech innovator becomes more difficult when you have no idea if that investment will be well spent.  

Now don't get me wrong -- I like to think that the USA is the only innovator in the universe.  But it seems to me that innovation in general can be, ought to be, good for everyone to some degree.  So hampering innovation (without a good reason) tends to not be a good thing.

Consider. Incremental improvements are awesome. Consider a 1% increase in the efficiency of solar cells, or a 1% increase in battery life, or storage capacity.  That can be a game changer.  Civilization lives on the margins. And for the past decade or so, China has contributed, and the world has benefited.

No more?

STAY TUNED for Trends; Docker; Perl6; and C.

I plan on getting back to using this blog.  There's always material to blog on; the trick is making it readably useful:

• A curated list of current IT industry trends that I find interesting.  
• My notes while learning Docker.
• Musings on WORST CASE SCENARIOS.
• My notes while learning Perl6 (a hobby).
• My notes while writing C (another hobby).
  

Thanks to my two loyal readers for sticking around!