…as seen from the point of view of a knowledge worker who experiences the world through the monitor, and is working with remote resources for years.
Bug 2000 and Year 2K problem
In the late 90ies there was growing discomfort with the centennial change. This was based on the realistic assumption that old archaeological code that existed since the 60ies utilized the two most significant bytes in the date format for other usages due to structural limitations in data as well as the so human assumption that it will be an NMP (not my problem).
Between 1998-2000 the “Year 2000 problem” was growing from the discomfort to major itch, and then a problem as IT managers and CIOs were scrambling to get resources to solve the issues – Old COBOL and Mainframes Assembly programmers where requited from retirement, and huge IT budgets were allocated to solve the problem.
I remember that the hype was, that planes may be falling out of the sky and elevators dropping due to unattended old code. To make a long story short, on January 1st 2000. There was no major issue. accept for some Norwegian trains delays.
I’m not saying that Year2K problem was invented or imagined – Only that it was used by the computer industry to get budgets and those budgets among dealing with date issues, were utilized for modernization of IT applications and other positive side effects.
Covid19 / Corona 2020 problem
What is in common between a modern day epidemic of Corona (the 2019 Covid flue virus) and the historical Y2K problem?
Nissim Taleb in his book “The black swan” describe is as:
“What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes.
First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme ‘impact’. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable”.
However not all black ugly ducklings are turned into swans. Some are just ugly duckling and those are differentiated from swan chicks by being perceived as outliers, yet, they are just not frequently experienced or are mere complex to explain, and presented as outliers by those who are extremely risk averse, or just have an interest to do so. Secondly their expected impact (probability times risk) is high. Since decision makers are not risk takers, especially in the health and IT industry where they are mostly cost centers, and have an incentive to blowup risks in order to get more budgets. Third, 20X20 hindsight is nothing new, but that’s because we don’t fear the past. In short no dinosaur extinction meteorite here… yet.
So, Covid19 just like Y2K are FUD (Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt) based sociological processes in which a rare event is interpreted non maliciously by decision makers so, that in hindsight they we not be responsible for outcome as well as for short term gains such a budgets.
This is by no means a conspiracy theory, all involved are not being part a big scheme, they are all acting to their best interests and according to their responsibilities. There is a flue virus just as there was a bug 20 years ago. No malicious intent is involved, all are just doing the most they can out of the situation, Not necessarily to the best of all. So is it a case of the tragedy of the commons?
Managing change on global scale
Change is not a monotonic process. Mathematically speaking there is striking similarity between the development of pandemic modeled by SIR model and socioeconomic change at macro and micro level. At macro level we can see in the following graph taken from the Atlantic magazine.
At macro levels changes come in waves modeled by the logistic curve and each wave is controlled by a dominating technological parameter, first agriculture then industrial and now information.
It is interesting to note that epidemiological process and economic change are interlaced historically. As the years after the bubonic plague saw growth in GDP due to the reduction in population… food for thought.
Those stacked logistical curves exist also in micro level as depicted in Charles Handy‘s Sigmoid curve
In the case of an epidemic, the SIR’s infectious stage, is triggering the transition to new Sigmoid / logistic curve riding on top of the old one.
Digital transformation on grand scale
Some genius translated the Covid 19 lockouts and quarantines into “social distancing”. This couldn’t be further from the truth for most. My kid learned English, gaming with Massively Multiplayer Online games with friends from Norway to Madagascar, my daughter has so many Whatsapp groups that she has to mute them, and I have given up years ago on reading all my inbox mails. Social interaction is no longer bounded by physical curfew, unless we’re talking about hospitality and transportation industry.
This is all good in personal life, but some organizational entities are not as agile, and large corporate organizations are challenged to move their frozen infrastructure. I ran an IT project for a large bank during the onset of the Corona – They were not able to get mails with attachments from the Internet to their isolated business network, all IT work was done locally with no remote access allowed and if you wanted to pass them files, you had a hall of a journey and not a pleasant one.
Once the Covid19 distancing happened, all IT staff stopped going to the office and shortly, production processes began the break.
In a week time! The bank provided access to IT employees from home. This would have been impossible to push past Info-Sec and regulators previously. But necessity is the mother invention, or change, and now there will no turning back.
Similarly, as depicted in the leading photo it was the first holiday dinner we were able to hold with the extended family in parallel with not one feeling left behind (and all enjoying their home food).
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” (Buckminster Fuller)
Epidemics are not new to the human race, and online collaboration tools are mature for quite some time – I’ve been working with various ones for years now, having meetings with dozens of people from multiple time zones is nothing new. I was working in a large corporate and once they adopted online meetings, it took only months to stop competing for crowded meeting rooms even if they were next door. We were held back mostly by culture and habit.
Where costs of commuting were exposed, there was this change years ago, why spend time and money flying for a status meeting when you can have it from your desk?
People are pushed by fear and pulled by laziness, the laziness factor was here log time ago, but Covid19 just gave it a little push.
I’ve witnessed moving in-premise services in positions into an outsourced activity. This is mainly due to gig economy as well as because most tech companies are geographically border-less now. This started with technical very universal skills like programming, but will continue for upstream positions like Project management and team leadership.
Large meetings and events are much easier to arrange remotely and it will be the norm. Not that live events will stop, but if in the past you had only movies and later TV, old technologies like meeting in person will have a place in imitations of relationships, but for ongoing meetings, the easiest rout will be online.
We can parallel, those of us who are regularly invited to multiple meetings over the same time slot, can be in listening mode simultaneously and say their part when needed. This comes handy in those ritualistic meetings where there must be attendance.
You can record anything any time, while automatic transcription becoming comfortable to use, and is much easier for voice recognition algorithms, when operated over separate voice channels in collaboration tools, then with noisy meeting rooms. So you if you miss, no drama.
Voice, video and line quality are going to play hugely and this will push 5G to mainstream giving CSPs (Communication Service Providers) opportunity to supply bundles that will deal with symmetrical up streaming at high speed. Because Covid19 I had to change routers twice in a very short time due to connection problems that were unnoticed before.
Organizational borders are finally dropping down. This is not a slogan as it was before. I used to coach agile software development in a brick & mortar insurance company, and had to physically do it in their learning center. During the pandemic they transferred the sessions to Microsoft Teams, and now even after is subsiding, they are continuing the sessions online. No drama there just more comfortable for all.
Remote workers and teams will now compete directly with on-prem teams. Old business lines are supported for long time now, by service desks that are on other continents, yet new projects and entry into new technologies can be greatly accelerated approaching remote development resources even if this is local industry and some translation is needed. This is well worth the effort and the cost reduction – I had to access X12 (EDI protocol) in one of my medical projects, and the cost of purchasing the code from some guy in Florida was much less then development it in-house.
Information security (and hackers) are into a thrill, as organizational boundaries are dropping, and the attack surface growing. The demand for IDM (identity management) solutions as well as virtualization is going to skyrocket. Even entities who already have those solutions will have to purchase more licenses.
Time to recovery / jump back
Paul Krugman is comparing historical employment growth after recessions in his NYT article and shows that if in the past recessions recovery was fast due to relation to the interest rate, modern recessions like the 2008 were not caused by central government intervention, but because of market structure, and thus were slower to correct.
