This week we are taking a look at a Horizon Report. I pulled up the 2021 Horizon report that was posted in February (Publications, 2021). It gave me a good chuckle when it stated that an “Uber Trend” was remote work. No, you don’t say! Page 8 went into far more detail, but like we could all have guessed, COVID-19 was mentioned in the first sentence. as the major contributing factor in the panel’s discussions. Remote work was considered so important that the title Uber was granted to this trend. I cannot disagree at all. Through my experience, companies used to say how infeasible remote work was, probably due to the age of the decision-makers, until the organizations were forced to take a look at it and leverage remote work this past year.
On the Executive Summary page, it mentioned, under trends in Technology, “Borderless Networks / Network without Boundary” and that immediately got my attention. What could that be? Page 10 gave me the information that I was looking for. Turns out this is the industrial term for networks that have gone beyond traditional networks. Cloud was brought up as an example, but bring your own device, mobile apps utilizing network resources, and other connections external to a traditional network. In Technological Trends, it is also mentioned “More Use of Personal Devices for Business”. Bring your own device, or BYOD, has been around for a while. Even in the military there has been an explosion of this, but only in a specific setting. The USAF Guard/Reserve has pushed “Desktop Anywhere” which allows the user to utilize their personal computers as if they were USAF systems on a USAF network and leverages VMware to make it happen. If you are interested in what’s involved: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwqWHaDLgxM&t=406s
The image below was pulled from the above YouTube video.
In the section “Economic Trends” the first topic is “Shift to Remote Learning”. That’s hard to believe. Do you know anyone taking any online courses instead of in-person classroom learning? My two associates, my BS, and MS degrees were all online. I traveled or was in foreign countries most of my career. 3.5 years in Germany, one year in Korea, and 4 years being a primary traveler jumping from one country and location to another. That is eight and a half years, all consecutive, in a 16-year career where I would not have been able to attend school if not for distance learning.
These different trends were “randomly” selected by my brain to review. “Random” because I probably latched onto a subject, I found interesting so not truly random. Of interesting is that each trend is basically the same trend but in a different flavor. It is all remote work. Borderless network, work from home, school from home, and BYOD are all related to taking your production, that is school or job, and bringing it to the house.
One of the reasons I am truly interested in this topic, and the reasons I know about corporate ideas relating to work at home, is because I know people that want to work but due to disabilities, mental and physical, they can not work in a traditional office but would be fully leveraged from their home environment. With this push, it seems that the thousands of doors that were closed for these people are now open.
Now a HUGE limiting factor, or LIMFAC, is the horrible and embarrassing state of our broadband environment in the US when compared to other countries. There are thousands of households in the US that only have dialup for internet connection, and with Telcoms abandoning copper but not rolling out fiber to these areas due to cost, it is only going to get worse before it gets better. What’s worse, they actively try to keep municipalities from servicing customers who they are not providing service through via bills and legislation.
References
Publications, E. (2021, Feb 16). 2021 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report® | Information Security Edition. Retrieved from EDUCAUSE: https://library.educause.edu/resources/2021/2/2021-educause-horizon-report-information-security-edition
On the Executive Summary page, it mentioned, under trends in Technology, “Borderless Networks / Network without Boundary” and that immediately got my attention. What could that be? Page 10 gave me the information that I was looking for. Turns out this is the industrial term for networks that have gone beyond traditional networks. Cloud was brought up as an example, but bring your own device, mobile apps utilizing network resources, and other connections external to a traditional network. In Technological Trends, it is also mentioned “More Use of Personal Devices for Business”. Bring your own device, or BYOD, has been around for a while. Even in the military there has been an explosion of this, but only in a specific setting. The USAF Guard/Reserve has pushed “Desktop Anywhere” which allows the user to utilize their personal computers as if they were USAF systems on a USAF network and leverages VMware to make it happen. If you are interested in what’s involved: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwqWHaDLgxM&t=406s
The image below was pulled from the above YouTube video.
In the section “Economic Trends” the first topic is “Shift to Remote Learning”. That’s hard to believe. Do you know anyone taking any online courses instead of in-person classroom learning? My two associates, my BS, and MS degrees were all online. I traveled or was in foreign countries most of my career. 3.5 years in Germany, one year in Korea, and 4 years being a primary traveler jumping from one country and location to another. That is eight and a half years, all consecutive, in a 16-year career where I would not have been able to attend school if not for distance learning.
These different trends were “randomly” selected by my brain to review. “Random” because I probably latched onto a subject, I found interesting so not truly random. Of interesting is that each trend is basically the same trend but in a different flavor. It is all remote work. Borderless network, work from home, school from home, and BYOD are all related to taking your production, that is school or job, and bringing it to the house.
One of the reasons I am truly interested in this topic, and the reasons I know about corporate ideas relating to work at home, is because I know people that want to work but due to disabilities, mental and physical, they can not work in a traditional office but would be fully leveraged from their home environment. With this push, it seems that the thousands of doors that were closed for these people are now open.
Now a HUGE limiting factor, or LIMFAC, is the horrible and embarrassing state of our broadband environment in the US when compared to other countries. There are thousands of households in the US that only have dialup for internet connection, and with Telcoms abandoning copper but not rolling out fiber to these areas due to cost, it is only going to get worse before it gets better. What’s worse, they actively try to keep municipalities from servicing customers who they are not providing service through via bills and legislation.
References
Publications, E. (2021, Feb 16). 2021 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report® | Information Security Edition. Retrieved from EDUCAUSE: https://library.educause.edu/resources/2021/2/2021-educause-horizon-report-information-security-edition
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