In 2022, companies will finally start to pay attention to the critical role that their network management team plays. A company’s overall success depends on whether their network and infrastructure are working efficiently and effectively, enabling the company’s employees to succeed, regardless of whether they’re in a central office or working remotely.
As the industry focus shifts from arbitrary service measurements to paying attention to what matters - the end users’ experience on and with the network - the way the network is managed and maintained will be in the spotlight.
#1: Networks Will Be Built Around Improving The User Experience
When the pandemic struck, the way the world worked came to a screeching halt, and then work changed forever. Employees suddenly were working remotely, and they would be doing so for the foreseeable future. This led to quick action by companies as they looked to ensure their employees could operate successfully outside of the office environment.
Now that time has passed and remote operations have become part of the way everyone works, organizations have started to take a second look at their networks and how well they’ve set up employees to work, whether they’re at home or back in the office.
When there are bad connections, or dropped calls, or interrupted workflows, employees remember. The times when a network acts as it should are never top-of-mind; it’s the bad memories, or the bad experiences, that are remembered.
Understanding of the importance of this will shift companies’ point of view in 2022 toward wanting to provide a better overall network experience for their employees.
Positive experiences will become the proper way to measure whether a network is successful. “Does it work?” and “Does it enable employees to work as intended, without interruption?” will become more important questions to ask than what’s the speed of the network or how much data it can handle. Both are important variables, of course, but only as they relate to the end-user experience provided, not as a measure of success on their own.
#2: To Have A Good Experience, There Must Be Good Management
In order to provide a good experience to employees, organizations need to provide network management teams with the necessary tools. That’s just common sense. Teams cannot be expected to do the impossible if they don’t have the correct tools and solutions.
When a positive experience is defined on the end-user’s terms, it means having strong connections that enable work to be done without interruption, anywhere, at any time. The important role that network managers play in providing the optimal end-user experience will finally be recognized in 2022, and this shift toward optimizing the end-user experience will drive investment in the kind of tools and solutions that make a positive experience possible.
For those managing the networks, the first item on the list is greater visibility into the status of the network. The ability to obtain real-time information and data allows for faster detection and more accurate actions to be taken, cutting down the time-to-repair (TTR).
Stronger management tools ultimately empower network managers to become proactive. This means that the technology they’re using makes it so easy to identify problems in the network, teams can take action quickly enough that they often discover and repair an issue before a single employee complains about it.
This is the optimal network experience possible for employees - one that’s so good, problems are repaired before they have a chance to degrade the network experience in a meaningful way.
#3: Application Of AI To Assist Network Managers
Progressing naturally from the focus on the user experience, and on who is responsible for optimizing that user experience, attention will turn next to how to improve the experience for the network management team themselves.
Next year, this attention will lead directly to increased adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools and solutions.
Embracing AI will enable organizations to automate, and in some cases, eliminate repetitive and mundane tasks from the network team’s responsibilities. While there will always be a need for experienced employees to solve the hardest network management problems, there are several factors converging that will make AI the most important ally a network management team has in 2022.
Pressure from within organizations to be more efficient and cut long-term costs continues. These pressures only seem to mount as the years go on. At the same time, additional staffing challenges stem from a labor shortage and potential employees choosing different lines of work that seemingly have a higher potential for career advancement. Implementing AI within your organization can help to solve both issues by improving the job description - saving money by automating repetitive tasks and giving those in the role time to work on higher-level tasks that are important to the business. This can also help to attract higher quality employees to an organization.
AI is not all about eliminating mundane tasks, however. Welcoming AI into the network management process brings other benefits as well. With improved network visibility, AI can help the team identify problems and troubleshoot what the cause could be. For example, in the traditional, manual way of doing things, a network manager could take weeks to work their way down a checklist to find the culprit of a drop in connection speed. With AI in place, the manager could automatically be directed to a suspected bad cable that should be tested and replaced.
Bad cables never top the list of manual troubleshooting - and the organization could have wasted time and money, and burned out a valuable employee, in the days or weeks it would take to uncover that issue manually, not to mention providing a bad end-user experience.
AI can also assist in more quickly solving the problem. Just as easy as it can find a bad cable, it could alert a network manager to an issue where there is Wi-Fi signal degradation in an office space. As a part of this alert, it could rank the three most likely culprits and give the network manager direct instruction on how to solve the issue. Meaning, even if the network manager had never encountered the problem before - and there wasn’t an experienced veteran on the team - there would still be no delay in repairing the user experience, as the AI would have their back.
Summing Up
Next year, there will be a shift toward defining networks in terms of the experience they provide, and at the same time, organizations will embrace the new innovations in the industry, such as AI, that can help them create that better experience for their end-users (and their network management team). The focus on what networks do for people - and how to enable them to do it more efficiently and effectively - will be a rising tide that will raise all ships before the year is through.
