Enterpise reality check - January 2022, week 2. No more horsing around...

Your unfiltered view of enterprise highs and lows. Surprise takes from special guests may be included – scroll on. For a deeper review of my enterprise picks and pans, check my weekly, snark-infested Enterprise Hits and Misses columns on diginomica.

The best thing I read this week: Okay, it was late last week, but Constellation's Steve Wilson nailed down Five Trends Shaping the Cloud Security Conversation. Amongst his authoritative strikes, Wilson de-escalated the "quantum computers will enable hackers to hack into anything" premature fear-mongering - but only for now:

Quantum computers will one day punch through the computational barriers that underpin most of today’s digital signature algorithms. For now, the threat tends to be exaggerated; some of the world’s best cryptologists advise the arms race will continue, with longer keys still offering protection for many years to come.

By the way, this is one of my big stomping points for the year: if you work in the enterprise, security is now part of your job description - period.

Selected commentary on the biggest news story: diginomica's Stuart Lauchlan was back on his retail beat, parsing the final 2021 holiday numbers roundups from Adobe and Salesforce. No big surprises, but that doesn't necessarily leave retailers in a happy place. Stuart concludes:

Based on those analyses, things turned out pretty much as predicted. As we push into 2022, many of the same pressures remain on the retail sector. The supply chain crisis is going to keep on hurting and the inflationary situation in large parts of the world isn’t going to help anyone... There will be plenty to talk about in omni-channel retail in 2022.

The underrated storyline I'm tracking: I ruffled some (productive) feathers with my slow-cook spleen vent, No, B2B and B2C content strategy are not the same - why the dynamics of attention for B2B content are different. I've heard from a couple of detractors - expect more dialogue and debate to follow.

The worst thing I read this week: I get the feeling I'm going to be hammering "AI can do everything" non-fiction fantasies a lot this year. Start with AI is quietly eating up the world’s workforce with job automation, which contains the hyperbolic AI braggadocio:

AI can easily generate text that is indistinguishable from human writing

Yeah sure, for a sentence, or maybe a paragraph. Then you're out of luck. Silly to get into this absurd over-estimation of AI when there is plenty of deeply-researched content on the future of work worth reading.

Backchannel scuttlebutt: I continue to be gobsmacked that event planners are headlong into spring event season without giving hybrid events serious creative consideration. This week, I heard from (another) major vendor pulling out of a big retail show in New York City, aka NRF. A show which to the best of my knowledge has no hybrid/virtual plans whatsoever. Good luck to the event planners who don't think virtual has creative potential - a shame when you consider that hybrid can cast a wider, more inclusive/international net, while providing some risk management. I came in hot on this topic as the guest on CRM Playaz - replay link to follow.

My diginomica quote of the week: I'm going with the always-edgy Neil Raden, from Will BI survive? Yes, but we may not recognize it:

You can't do BI without data, and data is still the most miserable part of BI. Data Quality. Data Governance, Data Modeling, Data Integration. All of these things make BI about as agile as poured concrete.

LinkedIn video replay picks: One of my fave Brent Leary weekly shows, "Watching Amazon - Is Amazon Live really embarrassing the mothership?" On my show, I put Eric Kimberling on the hot seat, pressing him to explain why digital transformations fall short, without using his go-to reason, "change management."

Zinger of the week: Believe it or not, I'm going with the founder of Second Life, on the (contested) future of the Metaverse:

Big Tech giving away VR headsets and building a metaverse on their ad-driven, behavior-modification platforms isn’t isn’t going to create a magical, single digital utopia for everyone... Virtual worlds don’t need to be dystopias.

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This edition's guest commentary

Who: Louis Columbus

How to track (your preferred contact, e.g. Twitter handle, blog links): Twitter: @LouisColumbus, LinkedIn: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/louiscolumbus/

What's your enterprise story of the week, and why?

The world’s largest semiconductor and chip manufacturers are doubling down on talent management to solve the chip shortage for the long-term. They’re concentrating on creating stronger alliances with colleges and universities to help solve the chronic talent shortages they have. The Wall Street Journal article, Chip Makers Contend for Talent as Industry Faces Labor Shortage, explains the extent to which leading manufacturers are working with educational institutions to attract new employees. Solving the talent shortage is key to alleviating severe chip foundry delays and shipment allocations that are too common today.

According to the Wall Street Journal, in the U.S. alone, around 70,000 to 90,000 workers or more will have to be added by 2025 from 2020 levels to meet the most critical workforce needs for anticipated fab expansion, according to a report by Eightfold.ai, a talent-management company. More-ambitious expansion to make the U.S. independent of foreign supply, which some members of Congress are urging, would raise the figure to 300,000 additional workers, according to the study.

The Wall Street Journal also notes that:

In May, Taiwan passed a law to promote innovation and education in high-tech sectors such as semiconductors, leading several Taiwanese universities to start specialized semiconductor colleges in partnership with companies including TSMC.

Getting talent management right will make or break any enterprise in 2022. Josh Bersin’s insightful take on the current severe labor shortage impacting enterprises is a great read: Welcome to 2022: Too Many Jobs, Not Enough People.

What's the underrated story too many are overlooking?

The role of API security in industry clouds, specifically in banking and financial services, is the most underrated story that too many media outlets and enterprise leaders aren’t prioritizing enough. DevOps industry publications are covering it, yet it needs a much broader level of discussion so enterprises pay attention it and engrain its core attributes into their internal DevOps strategies. For enterprise software vendors, securing APIs is a given today; there’s no excuse for not having that covered in an industry cloud strategy. The bottom line is API security is essential for e-commerce growth.??

The enterprise is dire need of:

Realizing that cybersecurity decisions are business decisions first, technology decisions second and investing that way. Given how fast the digital nature of selling and customer relationships is changing, no one can afford to be down for the weeks or longer it takes to recover from a breach.?Zero Trust Security’s potential to stabilize and improve digital transformation and the build-out of endpoints supporting new digital commerce initiatives needs to same priority of how tech stacks will need to adapt to a more turbulent way of operating in 2022 and beyond.

What's the most overhyped thing in the enterprise? (Where are projects getting off track?)

Web3 is the new hype platform differentiator marketers were looking for, making many of them Christmas Day pony happy (see image above!)

Fortunately there are excellent analysts looking to bring insights and expertise to Web3. The most valuable article this week on the topic are from Dion Hinchcliffe, who wrote What is Web3 and Why It Matters, an excellent read on the topic. The always-insightful Parmy Olsen has written an opinion piece that’s a must-read for anyone interested in this area, Web3 Just Had Its Emperor’s-New-Clothes Moment.

Thanks Louis!

Jon’s whiff of the week is: Facebook And Google CEOs Approved An Illegal Ad Deal, States Say. Not a 100 percent confirmed story, but smells (real) bad. You gotta love the level playing field of "Web 3" competition...

For my full whiffs collection, check my Enterprise Hits and Misses missives on diginomica. A new edition goes live each Monday morning.

This LinkedIn newsletter is intended as a jugular, no-fancy-formatting, best-of enterprise quick hit - with commentary, overlooked stories, and a few hype balloons punctured along the way. Then we end it - with plenty more to check out on diginomica if you want.

Let me know if this format is working for you, and how it can be sharpened or improved. This is not a copy/paste of content you'll find elsewhere, aside from a few scrounged bits. If you're like to be a guest contrib for a week, ping me.

Disclosure: this is not a diginomica newsletter. However, as diginomica is the main publishing endeavor I am involved with, I will disclose any personal OR diginomica clients in each newsletter: Salesforce and Adobe are diginomica premier partners as of this writing.