They say that "every moment is a teaching moment".

 Well that was fun, but what did we learn?

For the most part COVID as we know it, has been and gone in nearly all parts of the world and we are migrating to the "live with it" phase. Arguably, this is the hardest phase of all, the one where we all need to be accountable for our own behaviours, and health. 

Technology has taken an absolute hammering over the past two years. The sudden and violent shift to working from home, stretched just about every business I have spoken to, to near breaking point. The traditional centralised office was ripped apart in days and millions of people adjusted to working from home. Had we geeks had some choice, this would have been a planned transition over 6-8 months and rolled out in phases, with buckets of acceptance testing. 

But it wasn't so what did we learn - anything?

I learnt that just about anything can now be done over Teams or Zoom, sure its a little robotic and impersonal, but it can be done. I also learnt that these big app providers were ducks on the flat pond, with legs moving at the speed of light under the surface, rapidly releasing new features, and boosting our insatiable demand for connectivity and seamless experiences.

If nothing else it taught us resilience, both personally and technically. We all finally understood what all those endless BCP tests were for, it highlighted why under investment in mobility and remote connectivity was a dangerous game for executives, but most of all it opened our eyes to different ways of working.

I also learnt that I like working from home, and so do hundreds of thousands of others, so much in fact that senior executives around the world are resigning because their companies want them to return to the old ways. In NZ, the labour market is in crisis mode, we simply dont have enough people to fill the vacancies. We see engineering firms offering $10k signing on bonuses, and business paying up to 30% more, just to recruit people that two or three years ago, we never would have touched. 

The one thing we don't see though is people enabling true remote working. We see a lot of split weeks  but I cant see it lasting. Before long we will be back to normal because we are creatures of habit and we like what we know.

Remote working though is not only viable, but is essential to help employees recover from what has been a brutal time for nearly everyone. Part of this back to the office drive is that people need other people contact to function, part of it is retaining corporate culture, part of it is trying to improve employee productivity and these are all valid.

In my last blog, released just as Covid hit NZ, I talked about the sharing economy and how I saw, and still see, a new way of working coming for business. One where collaboration plays a much bigger part and the traditional technology barriers and empires will be torn down. Where it no longer matters where you are, where you can access any content from any device as long as you have connectivity. 

When we overlay that thinking with what COVID showed us about ourselves and we introduce true digital collaboration to the remote worker, this takes an interesting turn. It requires us to have always on, high performance networking, no matter where you are. This means merging 5G, 4G, copper, fibre, and WiFi into a single expereince. Part of the journey is cloud, part of the journey is well catered for in Microsoft's Modern Workplace and Azure Virtual Desktop solution sets. But we still need that last mile of connectivity. This is the new Shared Economy. 

At present we all build our own networks because we are worried about the experience and privacy, why?. 

If we are all in the cloud, and authentication is done centrally, by the app, in the cloud, what are we running from?. Why cant we share physical connectivity?. 

Organisations like municipalities and councils are over subscribed with fibre, the beating heart of a high performance network. What they lack is the know how to monestise the assets they have, and lets be honest it's hardly a core function. But they are also some of the largest landlords and asset managers in the country, with massive spawling physical and technology footprints. This makes them unique in their space. They have access to the most expensive part of delivering connectivity. The cables in the ground and the building, or high point real estate to hang 5G and Wifi from. 

Theres a reason connectivity from telco's is expensive, civil works are a huge handbrake to a business case. But what if we could leverage those existing assets, what if we could create seamless conectivty that just works, that brings together commerce, public safety and transportation? Connectivity is now a commodity, its like air and water, it just needs to be there.

As humans we all want that familiar face to face contact again, but our world will never be the same, we have uncovered new more productive ways of working. Urban sprawl is being super charged, not just housing but small satellite cities are being built that are completely self contained.  

At the same time IDC is forecasting 90ZB per year of data being created at the edge by IOT devices alone, with upwards of 50% of that stored in the local cloud. 30% of that edge generated data will be being consumed in real time (think edge compute), and all this by 2025, in only three years time.

Add to that, that 33% of the population will be Zoomers (Gen Z - born circa 2000) by 2050, and already today, over 50% of all people believe they are more productive away from the office.

People are living further and further away from the traditional hubs and there is only so much the trusty home internet connection can deliver, so I can see the emergence of regional, connected commerce hubs. Large shared office spaces, with restaurants and coffee shops, with childcare facilities in the basement or ground floor, where people will gather, socialise, entertain and network while they do their day job, instead of heading into the traditional office. 

These will be super intelligent, highly connected facilities, with features such as automated desk booking systems, smart personal lockers and non invasive technology that tracks specific users - (not just their booking profile), so Covid protocols can be enforced. Have a look at what these guys are doing for a sense of where we can go with this discussion. www.elevate-nz.com. 

They will leverage the very best of  Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and use the Internet of Things to manage and monitor the built environment. But with ubiquitous connectivity they can take emerging industries to the next level. Edge compute using 4G/5G and containerisation of apps at the edge, is now available, both through a traditional telco and through a private network that you can build yourself. In New Zealand, I believe Radio Spectrum Management is looking to how they can allocate spectrum exclusively for industry to develop its own services, and you can always take advantage of the unlicenced local spectrum. This means high performance apps can run anywhere, data centre footprints can be reimagined, traditional network architectures are disbanded and real time services using AI to drive efficient process are easily deployed.

These hubs of course need to be tightly integrated to public transport and centrally located with plenty of parking. Realtime solutions for transport management and public safety can now be rolled out on the new ubiquitous connectivity. 

You may argue that this is here today, but not in the way that we need for the next evolution of services. Not in a way that scales affordably and not in way that we can just embrace new services and industries from the next generation of technology. The establishment costs of the traditional approach are just too high.

Today's shared facilities are the domain of small emerging businesses, but that will change, as large enterprise rethink their property strategies, the traditional office will be transformed. 

At the very least they will become a mixed space, catering to a new generation of employees who want to be creative and connected. Quiet zones, relaxation pods, chill zones, they are all part of the staff retention strategy, which means multi tennanting our desk spaces to make room, so why are we not embracing true remote working. Many of these enterprises will likely simply not renew their leases and will devolve, after all we have shown we have the tools.

These commerce hubs have the potential to be the flagship of the green economy, as governments pour millions into reducing carbon footprints, we should be embracing the technology we already have today and be using it to support these initatives.

This is an opportunity for central government, and for councils, to really partner with business to promote economic recovery, network investment that can be truely monetised, and above else, the Sharing Economy can begin. The jourrney of Digital Transformation begins with a single step.