As I looked through the details of my discussions on 2023 technology trends, one thing I found interesting was that there were some questions that many people in the enterprise, service provider, and vendor communities thought needed answering next year. I’d classify most of them as technology-strategic in nature, meaning they represent things that network types in many roles think might drive change in our industry. OK, let’s try to answer them here, and I’ll present them in what I think is a top-down way.
Question one is what role will the metaverse play in business IT. People think this is important because there’s a general sense that business technology needs to somehow jump up to a new level in order to continue to enhance productivity and justify additional spending. This was the question that was rated most often, spontaneously, as the most important of the lot, and it’s also the most difficult to answer.
The broad market view of the metaverse is that it’s a virtual reality, visualized through some immersive display technology and linked in some way to at least the individual viewer/user, and perhaps to a group of users. This view likely evolved from Meta’s social-metaverse model, and it does have business value in applications like conferencing and training. However, users don’t rate those applications high in terms of impact on their business efficiency.
I’ve presented the metaverse in my blogs as a mixture of digital twinning technology and visualization technology. Any virtual reality is a reality first and a virtual visualization second, IMHO. The digital-twin concept is a mechanism that links sensor and potentially controller technology to a real-time model of a real-world system. A human wearing a sensor suit is one example, but an assembly line or even a smart building is another. The visualization piece shouldn’t be automatically be considered an avatar-based representation of the model, but rather a presentation of the model in a useful form. This model seems broadly applicable; you could fit the traditional view into it as well as almost any IoT application, but it’s not widely accepted.
So what’s the answer to the metaverse-impact question? Well, there is little chance of meaningful business impact of a traditional metaverse model in 2023, or even later, in my view. There is little chance that my digital-twin approach will be available to exploit in 2023 either, so there is no likely significant metaverse impact on information technology next year. I’d be happy if we got the the point of understanding what the digital-twin approach to the metaverse could offer us.
The next question is how much impact can we expect from artificial intelligence and machine learning? Here we can be positive; the answer is a lot of impact. AI/ML is the use of information systems technology to deliver insights, make decisions, or take actions without specific human intervention (hence “artificial” intelligence). We’re doing that now, and the use of AI/ML is going to explode in 2023, making it the most important technical element for the year.
The reason for this explosion is complexity. When I started programming, an application ran on a computer in a singular sense. You loaded and ran a program, not multiple programs at once or multi-component programs. It ran on a computer, not a resource pool of connected elements. You fed it data and the data was accepted at the pace the program could accept it. Data did not present itself and demand servicing. Nothing is simple these days, and there’s little question that if we want to continue to improve productivity and quality of life via IT, we will need even more complexity.
Complexity makes operations expensive at first, and eventually impossible. People can’t absorb the full range of relationships that exist today for even a single major application. If something goes wrong, they can’t easily identify what happened or select the proper response. AI/ML is a complexity manager and we are irrevocably committed to more complexity. Given this, the most important thing we need is a model for applying AI/ML, one that reduces complexity and the risks it creates. Do we get something like root cause analysis, recommendations on actions, or automatic responses? Probably all of these, or one of them whose selection depends on just what’s happening and how critical the system it impacts is to our operations or lives. What we need to look for in 2023 is less the explosion in AI/ML, less the technology, than the way we organize it into those operations and lives. If we don’t get that right, we may have our systems battling each other and creating even more complexity.
The third question relates to that point. People are wondering how we educate buyers, workers, providers, of technology as the complexity of elements and systems of elements are both expanding. This, to me, may be the most important question of all, even though it’s rated lower by the people I’ve talked with.
Those who read my blog regularly (or know me personally) know that I’m a poetry fan. So you won’t be surprised if I quote Milton here: “Who best bears his mild yoke, he serves him best.” Or maybe Emerson: “The world is like a multiplication table or a mathematical equation that, turn it as you will, balances itself”. Our work and our lives are a vast ecosystem, one that technology is expanding. Does anyone understand it all, or should our goal be to properly play the role we’ve selected or been assigned?
You could argue that the real metaverse value proposition is representation to facilitate simplification. You could say that AI/ML is really the same thing under the covers. We can cope with massive organizations, massive problems, if they can be divided into a hierarchy. That allows us to grasp the total picture as a sum of high-level things, and to decompose the details of the specific piece where we find ourselves. Companies rely on organizational hierarchy in their operation, but they usually fail to apply that principle to technology for two reasons.
Reason One is that information conduits today are driven by sales objectives. The tech world is a collection of products, in information terms, because product information is what’s presented in an ad-sponsored world. You can find information about programming languages, operating systems, middleware, servers, network devices…the list goes on. Suppose you want to run your company as cost-effectively as possible?
That leads us to Reason Two, we lack an intuitive view of the hierarchy into which tech elements fit to support a given mission. The process of knapping a stone knife is complex, but it’s easy to link the mission, the product goal, the materials, and the processes. If we were to assemble all the parts that make up an automobile in a big pile, I doubt even an automotive engineer could assemble them into a car without a blueprint. Where’s the blueprint that defines an IT ecosystem? The sum of any arbitrary set of parts don’t make a whole, it makes a pile of junk.
I’ve recounted my favorite CIO remark in past blogs. I was sitting with the CIO of a giant financial company and listening as he explained his challenges. All of a sudden, his eyes lit up as though he’d been struck with a great insight. He leaned forward, slapped his palms on his desk, and said “Tom, you have to understand my position. I don’t want decision support, I want to be told what to do!” So do we all, or at least we want to learn what to do. Who teaches us? That’s the educational question in a nutshell, and I have no answer, and it may be that until we can address this last question, answering the earlier ones will prove difficult.