🤔 Are You Keeping It Real?
This Week in Enterprise Tech, Episode 12, covered lots of less-than-hyped announcements. It was a breath of fresh air and perhaps a hint that we're returning to an era of pragmatism.
👋 Hi and welcome to The DX Report — the research hub of The DX Institute all about Digital Transformation, the Digital Experience, and the Digital Enterprise. I’m industry analyst, author, and speaker Charles Araujo, and I’m all about providing insights and analysis for enterprise IT leaders as you make the big bets about your organization’s future!
Despite the constant hype around AI — or maybe because of it — I've recently found myself hyper-focused on the pragmatism of being an enterprise IT leader.
I just published a piece for SymphonyAI on how AI Copilots are going to transform ITSM and I was very focused on the blocking and tackling they can help IT organizations handle. I also just finished the draft of a report covering how several enterprise executives are leveraging Zoho to drive what I referred to as pragmatic digital transformation (I'll share the link once it's published).
And, I'm sure you've seen this theme come through in my writing here.
When you're bombarded with hype, I think it's natural to try to focus on what's real. That's what I loved about this week's conversation on This Week in Enterprise Tech, the podcast I host with Hyoun Park, CEO of Amalgam Insights.
The full video and audio links, as well as show notes and links to all the articles we discussed, are below, but first let me explain what I mean.
The Only Job: Business Value
In this week's episode, we covered a story about how we're seeing cloud spending rise across the board. What appeared to be driven by AI, may be just a function of the continued shift from on-prem to the cloud. Blocking and tackling.
We talked about Tableau hitting its stride and broadening its focus beyond the data analyst. We discussed Amazon's new AI assistant, Q, and their laser-focus on the enterprise.
And we talked about the threat of a GenAI winter and my LinkedIn post that exploded because I claimed that IT Service Management (ITSM) is dead because it's lost strategic relevance.
The common thread in all of these wildly divergent news items was that they were really all about going past the hype and getting back to the blocking and tackling basics that enterprise IT leaders face everyday. And the root of all of it is that there's really only one job you need to tackle: delivering business value.
My little ITSM firestorm was perhaps most instructive.
My point was that ITSM had lost strategic relevance. That no one is talking about it. No one is investing in it. It's something that needs to be done, but it's in a race to the bottom because it isn't seen as something that contributes to value creation.
The irony is that ITSM is really just a specific form of business process digitalization and automation — now a top-of-mind concern for virtually every enterprise IT leader.
The point I was trying to make was that the dogmatic hole that ITSM fell into obscured its true worth. That if ITSM adherents could get out of their own way and see that it was really just about process, workflows, and automation, they could leverage it as a transformational tool.
The flip isn't in the tool or the process — it's in the focus.
I think we're going to see a lot of the same happen across a bunch of enterprise IT dimensions over the next couple of years. There is so much focus on the hype right now. But I believe this week's stories are a glimpse into a future where pragmatism will reign supreme once again one day soon.
Happy listening!
🗓️ This Week in Enterprise Tech, Episode 12
This week, Amalgam Insights' Hyoun Park and the DX Institute's Charles Araujo weigh in on five relevant trends for CIOs and strategic techies. Of note: Tableau’s plans to expand beyond their core data analyst users, IT service management becoming perceived as increasingly irrelevant with the rise of AI-driven configuration and deployment assistants, and the perpetual speculation around the next AI Winter.
Segment descriptions and links to all the articles we discuss are in the Show Notes, below.
Watch the full episode here:
Or listen to the episode here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2319034/15031244
📔 Show Notes
Cloud spend is rising again. Synergy Research reported Q1 numbers stating the cloud infrastructure market grew 21% YOY last quarter, the fastest this market has grown since Q3 2022. A combination of open wallets and AI-related work are driving spend, but Hyoun points out that vendors are continuing to tip the balance away from on-prem and towards cloud, and that large enterprises account for the majority of the spending spree. On a related note, Amazon 1Q earnings numbers came out and AWS is now up to $25 billion in revenue, $9.6 billion in income per quarter.
https://www.srgresearch.com/articles/...
https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-tr...
Hyoun flew down to sunny San Diego for the Tableau Conference. Tableau’s next steps include expanding beyond their core data analyst users, making their data management tools more accessible to a wider variety of employees, and there’s a roadmap to bring analytics and AI together. But how has the Salesforce acquisition and partnerships with Databricks and Microsoft affected this?
https://www.tableau.com/blog/product-...
Charles was in Denver for SupportWorld last week, a support and service management conference. With attendance down 75% from its peak, is IT support management itself a dying concept? Innovate or die seems to be the watchword.
https://www.hdiconference.com/
The race to release Gen AI assistants is on: Amazon officially released its Gen AI assistant, Amazon Q, while Anthropic announced the latest version of its business-focused bot, Claude 3. Hyoun and Charles debate how these bots are a harbinger of change to traditional IT services, focused on standardizing configuration and deployment.
https://press.aboutamazon.com/2024/4/...
https://www.reuters.com/technology/an...
Finally, the world has been through several AI Winters, and after the most recent rush of development and trialing, some are stepping back to parse what’s been effective, and what’s been hype. But “winter” doesn’t necessarily mean the end of all things Gen AI, Hyoun and Charles agree, it’s about strategic investment in what matters for your business.