Where Do We Go From Here?

For a wanderlust, the past year has been less than adventurous. A quick escape to Maui is usually my rejuvenator. In the last 365 days, however, the greatest exploits may well have been those early scavenger hunts for toilet paper.

Those days feel like an eternity ago. And so, too, does our traditional model of operation. While we may have felt physically confined during this past year, business has been anything but static. We’ve experienced impressive evolution to the “anywhere” enterprise. And while the shotgun moves to remote work and restrictive business operations certainly caused injury to the bottom line, the digital-first experiment seems to be paying off.

From optimizing ad hoc work-from-home solutions to modernizing operations to enable IT transformation, organizations are prioritizing these initiatives to experience the ROI and competitive advantage of decentralized operations.

However, the past year also illuminated a great deal of inequities, not least of which was the unfortunate reality of the digital divide. While digital services brought classrooms to the living room and dinner to the doorstep, communities and households without access to Wi-Fi or personal devices struggled to get what they needed in a digital-first society. It’s why we partnered with a municipality to bring broadband public Wi-Fi to its community.

In the tech industry, we can be guilty of “tomorrow vision.” We’re focused on embracing emerging technology, keeping up with tech trends and getting ahead of any competition. But it’s important to bring people along with us through change. There’s a human side to technology that should remain central to our technological ambitions.

Perhaps coming into each other’s homes every day was an adventure in empathy, opening up new avenues of understanding. We’ll someday (hopefully soon) emerge from COVID-19 to a different world, with new ways of doing things and changed perspectives. I hope this new world will include greater equality, easier access, stronger collaboration, and more kindness and understanding.

So, where do we go from here? The answer is anywhere — the possibilities are virtually limitless.

Explore our spring 2021 issue of the Tech Journal.