Rolling With the Punches in 2022Rolling With the Punches in 2022

Welcome to 2022! If you were taking some well-deserved time off the last couple of weeks of 2021, you might have missed the terrific year-end articles that the editors of No Jitter posted. If you get the opportunity, I encourage you to check out the array of insights that our contributors offered up. I want to call your attention to one in particular: The Show Must Go On: A Project Team Migrates Through Supply Chain Issues, by Melissa Swartz of Swartz Consulting.

As the title suggests, Swartz relates the story of a client’s experience in migrating to a new cloud voice system. The highly creative IT team faced shortages of almost every kind of hardware device you need to deploy a communications system, at both the end-user and the network level, due to the chip shortage. Keeping the process moving and supplying end users with the necessary capabilities required a new level of planning, adaptability, and foresight. I encourage you to read the whole article; it’s a great story of both the challenges and the resourcefulness that helped overcome them.

As enterprise IT/communications organizations move into 2022, I believe these themes will be among the most important: resourcefulness, flexibility, and foresight. We talk a lot about the new technology, and the way existing technologies are being enhanced to fit the new world of hybrid work, but we’re hearing from IT/communications professionals that the job right now is as much about keeping teams motivated in the face of the Great Resignation and keeping projects on track in amid challenges like those Swartz describes in her article.

That’s why we’re devoting a segment of the Enterprise Connect 2022 program to what I’ve been calling “IT pain points.” We’ll be running several peer discussion groups at the event in Orlando, in which we’ll bring folks together to share experiences and ideas. We’re fortunate to have Swartz facilitating just such a session, focusing on ways to cope with the chip shortage. She’ll be able to add insights like those in her article, but the emphasis in all these sessions will be on attendees talking to one another.

I wouldn’t have expected that one of the nicest people I know would conclude her article by quoting Mike Tyson, but it was pretty apt. I’ll let you read the article to see it but suffice it to say that a big part of succeeding in 2022 will involve rolling with the punches. Enterprise Connect 2022, which happens the week of March 21 in Orlando, Fla., and virtually, is going to focus heavily on helping you do that. I hope you’ll check it out and consider joining us.