Just some stuff that's interesting
Thirty years is long enough to notice patterns, but also long enough to notice that patterns don't stick around like they used to. Here's a rambling list of things that feel worth thinking about in the digital workplace space.
Remote work stopped being a thing that needed defending. It's just... work now. The conversation moved on.
Tool sprawl got worse before anyone figured out it was worse. Everyone could feel it but nobody could see it.
IT service desks never actually got smaller, they just got quieter about different problems.
Everyone talks about change management but the real bottleneck is usually just deciding what you're actually trying to change.
The word "adoption" started meaning something different depending on who's using it. Sometimes it's users, sometimes it's just "didn't rebel against it."
Integrations are still hard in ways that demos never show.
Employee experience became a department, then a responsibility, then nobody was quite sure whose responsibility.
Meeting fatigue is real but it's weird how it's not actually about the number of meetings.
Asynchronous work sounds great until you realize most people are still waiting for answers in real time.
Single sign-on solved one problem and created five others.
Cybersecurity got personal. It's no longer just IT's job. Everyone's job now.
Microsoft 365 didn't kill alternatives, it just made everyone else run much faster.
Slack changed how people think about internal communication, then Teams changed how people think about Slack.
API first sounds revolutionary right up until you try to implement it.
Knowledge management has been "about to work" for a really long time.
Budget cycles still happen the same way they did twenty years ago even though everything else changed.
The people who care most about digital workplace stuff are usually not the people with the biggest budgets.
Every workplace is "unique" in ways that make standard solutions feel generic.
Cloud migration made some things easier and just moved other problems around.
Workflow automation is great until you realize what needs automating is usually people's decisions, not their clicks.
Vendors got really good at using the word "ecosystem."
Shift work and gig workers barely register in most digital workplace conversations, which is probably worth noticing.
The hybrid work question never got answered because the answer kept changing.
IT budgets still skew toward keeping systems alive instead of making them better.
Young people coming into workplace tech don't actually care about the same things the industry built itself around.
Security theater is real and everyone knows it.
Generation gaps in the workplace showed up as digital gaps faster than anyone expected.
The "best practices" conversation assumes a level of standardization that almost nobody actually has.
Data governance sounded boring until it became expensive.
Nothing really ties together
None of this is particularly wise or surprising. It's just what happens when you stack thirty years of workplace technology and people together. Some things got better. Some things just got more complicated in different ways. Some things everyone thought would matter didn't, and some things nobody was paying attention to became the actual thing that mattered.
The interesting part isn't any single item on this list. It's that the list itself is pretty different from what anyone would've predicted three decades ago. Not because the predictions were wrong exactly, but because they were mostly thinking about technology getting better, and what actually happened was that people and technology kept figuring out new ways to disappoint each other.
Also half these things will probably be different observations in another five years and that's kind of the point.