4 IT Trends to Watch for at Enterprise Connect 20224 IT Trends to Watch for at Enterprise Connect 2022
This year’s Enterprise Connect sessions provide a snapshot into the challenges facing those in enterprise IT communications and collaboration.
February 14, 2022
As enterprise IT communications and collaboration professionals gather for the first in-person Enterprise Connect in three years next month, perhaps many attendees will have one key question on their mind: Where do we go from here?
After nearly three years of unprecedented workplace changes and accelerated digital transformation, IT professionals are not only juggling a variety of line-of-business tasks and projects, but they’re also maintaining the work they started during the pandemic of enabling employees to work wherever. Additionally, they are bracing for the future of collaboration, which brings a host of new and old IT challenges and opportunities.
Enterprise Connect 2022 is geared around examining these challenges and how in-the-trenches professionals are meeting them. Some key IT trends are taking shape through the programming, and they include:
Hybrid work continues to become more of a mainstream workplace reality: In 2022, many enterprise leaders are once again feeling optimistic about returning to the office, whether in a full-time onsite capacity or with the increasingly in-demand hybrid models. While some IT teams have been preparing their return-to-office plans since the start of the pandemic, a lot has changed since then. For perspective on enabling hybrid work, Enterprise Connect will be featuring a host of sessions on the topic. Some sessions include “Collaboration in the Hybrid World: Enterprises Speak Out,” “How to Match Your Technology Strategy with Your Enterprise’s Evolving Hybrid Work Plan,” “Virtual Events in the Hybrid World,” and others.
Contact centers decisions take center stage: Over the years, the contact center space has seen tremendous growth and a host of innovations, especially around AI. With more eyes on the contact centers than ever before, this is complicating the decision-making process. This will be the focus of a session from CCaaS expert Sheila McGee-Smith, titled “Who Should be Making Contact Center Decisions in 2022? IT? Customer Service? Marketing?” Joined by a panel of representatives from vendor organizations, McGee-Smith will share how customer service and marketing organizations are vying for a seat at the contact center technology table.
Focusing on the IT “basics”: For all the talk of a metaverse and VR collaboration, many IT professionals are more concerned with the everyday and mission-critical projects like migrating their on-prem contact center system to the cloud or building a robust network security strategy. The ever-expanding list of IT projects also comes when IT teams are meeting a host of challenges from device shortages, spurred by the chip shortage, and staff shortages, requiring many to resort to a form of ruthless prioritization. Also, hybrid work will most likely bring with it a series of IT obstacles, which include: employees needing to be trained (or retrained) on rooms systems and addressing interoperability issues that might be complicating the meeting-room experience.
Workplace challenges will lead to more cross-department collaboration: Just as contact center decisions are bringing marketing, customer service, and IT teams together, elsewhere in the enterprise, IT professionals are teaming up with HR and facility professionals to enable the future of work. For a key as to what this teamwork might yield, make sure to check out the “Matching Conferencing Tech to Office Spaces” session, presented by Omdia Analyst Prachi Nema.
These are a few of the trends emerging just ahead of the Enterprise Connect event. To learn more about the Enterprise Connect program, please visit the website here. No Jitter readers can also take $200 off your full registration by using promo code NJNews22. Register today!
