In a swirling environment, we need steady heads to stay firm and focus on what is essential, rather than be victims of the annual frenzy of ‘leading’ and ‘mandatory’ technologies, because business, like life, is continuous.
A steady head is a rarity these days, given that most people are vulnerable to trend swings, driven by a deep of insecurity and fear that they will not be ‘in sync’, if they didn’t embrace the new. And when trend generation is a full-time activity for many, this can be a tiresome activity. And, if it emerged from those in the business of technology advice, the more so. In the field of IT, this is an annual ritual with a well-developed ecosystem of cacophony. The circle of influence is actually a web of deceit. For CEOs of IT companies, this could spell disaster. For listed companies, this can be particularly bothersome as they are ‘questioned’ by both media and equity analysts alike on what ‘they are doing in these technologies’. In what follows, I am trying to steer clear of naming names because my objective is to warn.
The competitive tech advice environment
Although everyone is aware of this, it makes sense to emphasize that there is technology – proprietary and otherwise and there is the business of technology aided and abetted by the business of technology advice. It is amazing how such ‘advisory firms’ can move from their forecasts of one trend to a whole set of new trends without checking what happened to the previous ‘forecasts’. They invariably escape real scrutiny except some rantings from some marginalized techies because they enjoy the support of tech and business media. Some of these ‘advisory firms’ have become global ‘brands’ and the business media, rarely, if ever, questions them or tracks their work and see how many of the technologies they forecast as fundamental really did pan out so. You will most probably encounter many quietly buried ‘technologies’.
The technology advice industry revels in creating false images of latest ‘trends’, ‘cutting-edge’ technology etc, without paying any heed to their credibility and actual realizable potential. There is intense competition in the business of technology advice with each such firm under pressure to ‘find’ new ‘cutting-edge’ technologies to market themselves as ‘thought leaders’. This leads to a barrage of ‘new discoveries’ screaming for attention. You don’t have to fall a prey to this competitive pressure. Keep your head not insulated but focused.
One of the determining features of the technology and IT industry is the vast gap between users of technology and its creators. To be sure, you will come across this difference in almost every industry or business. For example in medicine. Or automobiles, a business which has seen significant and fundamental changes in engine technology. Sure, consumers may well fall for marketing gimmicks and suffer as a consequence. There is a difference in the business I am talking about – users are enterprises, who can be expected to evaluate technology buying decisions based on reason. However, they are seen primarily as being in business to produce value, whatever their businesses be, and have to be seen to be doing everything that promotes more value. It is here that the influence of mass media, especially on senior management, can be quite disastrous. Companies end up buying technology they have no use for, often in a rush or the need to be ‘seen’ as being in sync with the latest.
Rivers of trash information
In certain (evolving) technologies, the need to find commercial applications of technology drives enterprises to hastily market their ‘products’ to (unsuspecting) customers. Some of the worst examples occurred during the dot com boom especially in e-commerce, with companies buying complex software they could not understand or use simply because the required ecosystem had not yet developed. Ecommerce software vendors made merry.
What Physics Nobel Laureate Robert Laughlin says in his book The Crime of Reason in another context is relevant here. He talks of new discoveries made by any enterprises and what they do to protect their ‘secret’. One way is to unleash a barrage of (useless) information. As Laughlin says, “That’s one of the main reasons young industries publish so much. The river of trash information confuses your competitor and forces him to spend intellectual resources ciphering out trivialities, while the truly important thing slips through his fingers” (Page 32, Chapter 3).
Right now, the buzz, artificially generated, is over something called ‘formative artificial intelligence’, an awfully misleading expression. As Keri Allan of IDG Connect explains (October 26, 2020) (https://www.idgconnect.com/article/3586601/what-is-formative-ai-and-why-should-you-care.html), “Formative AI is an umbrella term given to a range of emerging AI and related technologies that can dynamically change in response to situational variances. Some may enable application developers and UX designers to create solutions using AI-enabled tools, while others facilitate the development of AI models that can evolve dynamically to adapt over time”. The article then quotes Svetlana Sicular, VP analyst at Gartner as saying that “The most advanced can generate novel models to solve specific problems”. For reasons not explained, the article quotes a software architect as saying that technologies brought under this umbrella term are considered to “aid in the drop in price of prediction”, which is why businesses should care about them. It goes on to include adaptive machine learning also known as adaptive automatic learning. What else is ML as in machine learning? Why all the unnecessary additions and dubious interpretations?
This is just one example but you can find many more if you did a search for leading technologies for specific years. At a time when we are told every day how data drives decisions, it is inexplicable how such phraseology even catches attention. And no one tracks the progress of such forecasts. Perhaps this is an occupational hazard for IT companies and their senior management. Perhaps they have managed the art of pretending to listen.
And how many enterprises can just move from one ‘latest’ technology to another without extracting the full benefits of investments into such technologies? Any enterprise will keep investing more in either one or a limited number of technologies which, they hope and expect, will yield desired returns. To be sure, they will hedge their bets to stay protected if something doesn’t work out the way they visualized but no one has an unlimited budget.
What is worrying is the desire to ‘see’ trends every year, as if accounting for every 12 months, calendar or financial, is inherently worthwhile. Why this fixation, beyond statutory requirements, defies logic. And this is happening at a time when entire ‘histories’ are being reexamined and reevaluated based on new information made available through release of previously classified information or archival research. Be it the French revolution, Nazism, the development of capitalism, development of science, the so-called dark ages and many more have come under intense scrutiny with fundamental revisions undertaken wherever necessary. So many things we have believed to be true or never questioned are being shown to be different from what we have hitherto believed. Re-evaluation has become an integral part of the way we live.
If life is continuous, so is business. Yes, there is discontinuity too but it does not adhere to a 12-month timeline. CEOs and senior management would do well to pay heed to this fundamental truth.
Takeaways
Trends in technology can be a whirlpool
Businesses cannot get carried away by the business of technology advice
Beware of the rivers of trash information
Technology takes time to build and deliver
Nothing sacrosanct about a 12-month timeline
Continuous re-evaluation is necessary
