The problematic state of our technological infrastructure

Isn’t technology amazing? We can buy almost anything on Amazon. We can call almost anyone in the county – the world! We can Facetime. We can TikTok. We can tweet. We can do podcasts. We can stream. We can find love. We can monitor our heart, sugar and how many steps we take each day. We can close the books. We can find customers. We can advertise. We can manufacture. We can innovate. Amazing, for sure.

When it works.

When we can afford it.

When it’s not driving us crazy.

Let’s look at the infrastructure elements that challenge our personal and professional lives – and some opportunities – however lame – for digital managers to come to the rescue when frustration – and cost – overwhelms us.

Transmissions

This is particularly challenging. Cell phone coverage in the US is poor – even in residential areas. 5G is rated by CFOs. My densely populated area has extremely poor AT&T and Verizon cell coverage. I have to leave my house to get a second bar (worth more than gold) – or drive around until my phone works. There are dead zones everywhere, but we know where they are – which helps when we need to make important calls or zoom with confidence. Cell phone service is also extremely expensive compared to other parts of the world – including India, Japan, South Korea and all of Western Europe – where coverage is widespread and costs are about half of what they are in the US .

• Note #1: It took me over four hours just to switch carriers – and then both phones started receiving the same calls.
• Note #2: when I recently visited an Xfinity store to replace a broken modem, everything was dead: the Xfinity network was down, and the Xfinity store was struggling to do business without its own network: ironic, sure.

Here are some facts:

“In Argentina, mobile data plans are available for as little as $4.00 USD per month. How is this possible when Americans pay about $114 a month on average for their cell phone bills?

“According a recent study, US data plans “they are some of the most expensive in the world.” Americans pay about 40% more on average than people living in France, Japan and Israel, who enjoy comparable Internet speeds.

Enterprise Technology

Annual global technology spending is approaching $7T – $2T in the US. But the percentage of business technology projects that fail is astronomical. It was always astronomical. Large network, ERP, CRM and analytics projects fail all the time. In fact, the majority of these projects fail at a huge cost to the companies that launch them. A staggering 70% of digital transformation projects fail. The Gartner Group reports that 55% – 75% of all ERP projects fail. Failure is persistent in all industries year after year, decade after decade. If ever there was a case of inexplicable normalization, this is it.

Ease of use

How many different interfaces do you encounter every day? You use one for email, another for your analytics app, and another for your browser: on a given day, the average “user” works with approx. 10 applications per day (and 30 per month) – all with different interfaces. We also download apps at an incredible rate: The average American has downloaded 80 apps to their phone – all with a different look and feel. I especially love this one: “74 percent of respondents currently have more than five apps open at the same time, while 16 percent have 15 or more apps open at the same time.” How much time do we spend learning how to operate all the apps?

passwords

How many passwords do you have? Do you remember them? Do you need to reset them on a regular basis? Have you written it all down? (I hope not.) How many of the “new” ones are actually the “old” ones that you hope won’t be discarded because they were used in the previous year – or month? Things get worse with 2 and 3 factor authentication. What if you don’t have your phone handy to approve the “push”? What if your phone is out of power? (For the record, for history, for purely formal reasons, the average user has 100 (codes.)

The number and severity of security breaches is skyrocketing. Even the Department of Defense was breached without anyone really knowing how bad the breach actually was. Amazing, given the trends:

“Approximately 110.8 million user accounts were compromised in the second quarter of 2023, with the US accounting for nearly 45% of the global number.”

OK then.

Internet access

Internet access is extremely expensive in the US compared to the rest of the developed world. Worse, it doesn’t always work. How is this “Currently, about 42 million Americans lack access to broadband, according to Broadband Now”?

There are more:

“The Milken Institute Review says that “Nearly two in five US households live in areas with only one or two Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and 70 million Americans have only one choice. Unlike France, where everyone has a choice of at least four ISPs (and Parisians have 29!), or the UK, where most people have a choice of six.”

“In other words, if you live in an area with only one ISP, that company can basically charge whatever they want for their monthly service. People will pay because they have no other choice.”

Time badly spent

Have you ever wondered how much time you spend on all of this? How much time do you spend analyzing whether or not you should upgrade your phone, wondering if this is the month you cut the cord – or find your passwords? (Why so few of us use Password managers😉 How many hours do we spend analyzing, avoiding and optimizing? Is there a conspiracy surrounding these digital distractions? Do those who provide digital products and services want to distract us while quietly raising fees?

The timing of all this is strange. As more and more transactions go online, the cost and quality of digital infrastructure rise and fall in almost perfect harmony. Worse, all of this is associated with a growing digital dependency where economic benefits for the few come from the many – all good as long as there is a balance between access, quality, fees, revenue, competition, innovation and profit (AKA a level playing field).

It’s incredible how easily everyone accepts business failure rates of, say, 75% for ERP projects. Or how many times a day their internet crashes. Or how many calls are dropped. Or how much it costs to call each other on phones that actually work. Or have efficient internet access so they can work from home. Or how hidden passwords defeat their ability to function in an all-digital world.

Digital Saviors?

Can we save ourselves from this ‘troubled’ digital infrastructure? Unfortunately, some of the solutions are political. Net neutrality is an old solution to some of these, and subsidies are even harder to get. Without competition, costs will likely remain high unless significant numbers of consumers protest with their pocketbooks. But this is also unrealistic, as we all need our digital games to live and work and the trends towards industry consolidation are strong. The password problem is solvable because it is in your control. Password managers work well for most of us, but they’re not perfect, so do your due diligence before choosing one.

Technology business project failure can be reduced with some discipline in the project selection and management process. But this discipline falls under the “What are you ready to do?” category. References to the untouchables and Sean Connery’s classic question is apt. Most CEOs and their executive bosses avoid the hard problems even when the wheels come off big projects. The good news is that enterprise technology projects don’t have to fail. They can be saved with the right managers and executives committed to making tough decisions at the right time, even when the decisions affect their long-time corporate friends. Is this kind of discipline unattainable? Mostly it is, but it’s certainly closer than changing what everyone pays for cell phone service or internet access.

Usability? In a competitive world of applications, the possibility of standard interfaces is impossible now and forever – although there are “principles of user interface” available to designers. In fact, creative interfaces that violate subjective look and feel are rewarded by the market. The key is to think hard about the number of apps you really need. The lower the number, the easier it is to navigate. But we all know that an increasing number of activities are enabled by apps on your phone. Therefore, it is impossible to reduce the number of applications – and interfaces – that you need to learn.

conclusion

Regardless of how you feel about any of these infrastructure challenges – and we face many more – there’s no doubt that there’s a risk of collapse when business and strategic technology refuse to marry no matter how seductive it might look to the wedding party – my paying customers the accounts. Expand just a little. What happens when the number of passwords you’re trying to manage reaches 200 and the number of apps you use every day grows to 50? What happens when corporate technology projects collapse under their own financial weight? What happens when cell phones and Internet access become too expensive to afford? What happens when you no longer remember where the dead zones are? What happens when everyone drives to Starbucks at the same time to hook up?

As you read the steps a digital savior can take, you should be disappointed. They are lame. Challenges are here to stay — with more on the way. ChatGPT: what to do you I think so? Can you save us?