This year is the first time APMdigest is posting a separate list of Remote Work Predictions. Due to the drastic changes in the way we work and do business since the COVID pandemic started, and how significantly these changes have impacted IT operations, APMdigest asked industry experts — from analysts and consultants to users and the top vendors — how they think the work from home (WFH) revolution will evolve into 2022, with a special focus on IT operations and performance. Here are some very interesting and insightful predictions that may change what you think about the future of work and IT:

REMOTE WORK BECOMES PERMANENT

Fully remote work will continue to be adopted permanently as employees prefer workspace customization. Expect to see even more companies embrace fully remote work, and possibly even a backlash against the ones trying to make hybrid models work. IT leaders can help in two ways. First, review and make changes to their company's collaboration tools to ensure asynchronous communication is supported and available to all employees. Second, if you're not already mailing out laptops to new hires, start now. Even if your IT team is centralized, distribution of machines needs to move from picking laptops up in the office to receiving it via mail prior to their start date.
Olivia Montgomery
Senior Analyst, GetApp (a Gartner company)

DIGITAL ENTERPRISE REPLACES OFFICE-CENTRIC BUSINESS

One such expected trend in 2022 is digital enterprise, which is the move from traditional "brick & mortar" office space to a largely distributed/hybrid posture which supports a largely remote work force and geographically dispersed partners and customers. By 2023, Gartner is expecting 75% of organizations that benefit from distributed enterprises to see revenue growth 25% faster than competitors, most likely replacing the traditional office-centric business environment of the past.
Bill Kane
Director, ServiceNow Practice, Synoptek

DIGITAL HQ

With everyone working from anywhere, our digital HQ will continue to become more important than our physical HQ in the coming year. There is an imperative for employee experiences to be seamless. In 2022, more companies will look to implement a strategy that empowers teams across their organization with easy access to the apps and data they need to do their jobs most effectively. CIOs will need to drive collaboration among the organization by enabling both IT and business teams to access, unlock and integrate data and apps in a secure, governed manner.
Brent Hayward
CEO, MuleSoft

THE HYBRID WORKPLACE

The entire COVID and pandemic experience has become in some ways a giant social experiment. We were able to brute force test many things. For example, how flexible work really works, how efficient is it for businesses to be in a flexible working model. Because of this, I don't think any of this is going away anytime soon. I see the future of work as supporting an increasingly flexible workforce inside of an increasingly flexible workspace. What I mean by that is that I think people will now feel almost every employer will have a heightened sense of comfort. Comfort with hiring people in relatively remote areas. At the same time, I think there is going to be a working expectation that regular office visits will need to take place, again for that important face-to-face time and collaboration time. I think the way that that paradigm shift plays itself out, even in terms of real estate, is actually that people are going to want more office space not less. I think people are going to want more social activities inside of an office space and potentially outdoor areas around an office space. People are going to want the flexibility to be in a private area as well as a collaborative space, or even in a space that may reflect some of the things that they enjoyed at home, sitting on a couch, open area, etc. A place where you can go to relax in between finishing a presentation. I believe we will continue to see increased flexibility in both the workplace as well as increased flexibility in the way that we work.
Simon Taylor
CEO and Co-founder, HYCU

THE HYBRID EMPLOYEE-CUSTOMER JOURNEY

The great pandemic work-from-home experience has brought the "hybrid workplace" to the fore: one that combines remote and on-site work. Competitive business is always focused on the best possible customer experience, and what's newly emerging from the hybrid workplace is a "hybrid employee-customer journey" that integrates both through business process applications. Employees and customers both need smooth, painless and supported experiences, and business applications built on digital process automation platforms are going to focus more and more on how everyone involved in critical end-to-end processes has that best possible experience.
Miguel Valdes Faura
CEO and Co-Founder, Bonitasoft

REMOTE WORK STRATEGY

Just as organizations are currently expected to have succession and security plans within their DevOps Platforms, having a well-built remote work strategy will be critical to business continuity in 2022. Startups are building new digital-first tools and workflows that will leverage the virtual space in ways unimaginable pre-COVID. New collaboration tools are being created from a blank slate, not bound to office-first legacy requirements, building for the future and pulling it into the now. Globally, we're in the "awkward teenager phase" of remote work — we think we're grown up, fully acclimated to digital-first environments, but many organizations are using old tools and workflows, not taking full advantage of the clean slate we've been gifted. We'll see this shake out in 2022 as most organizations fully implement their workforce plans.
Darren Murph
Head of Remote, GitLab

TECH PROS RE-EVALUATE TOOLS

Tools, technology, and processes will be re-evaluated by tech pros to accommodate the changing nature of hybrid work. While businesses continue to navigate the new normal, tech pros will be tasked with maintaining and supporting hybrid workplaces by implementing new tools and technologies. To keep up with the pace of change, they'll also need to continuously re-evaluate existing tools and processes. Tech pros should take a step back and review the goals of refining processes or implementing a new tool. Are you aiming to enhance visibility or eliminate silos? Improve communication, reduce bottlenecks, or enhance the user experience? When introducing changes, consider the holistic impact on those responsible for implementing these updates and the end users. As you evaluate new tools or business processes, focus on the value these changes will bring to the organization.
Liz Beavers
Head Geek, SolarWinds

INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT BECOMES HYBRID

After the work from home revolution settles into a new reality for all companies, the accelerated move to the cloud for enterprise organizations will continue to drive a new reality of fully hybrid infrastructures. Infrastructure management will also become completely hybrid allowing IT organizations to use integrated dashboards providing visibility across the technology silos. Network infrastructure, datacenter infrastructure, cloud infrastructure all the way up the enterprise stack to users and applications will be consolidated into unified tooling.
Andrew Anderson
President & Co-Founder, Netreo

FOCUS ON APM

IT leaders will continue to focus on application performance with an eye towards improvements in speed and supporting more technology and data.
Mike Marks
Product Marketing, Aternity

COMPLETE END-TO-END VISIBILITY

After sitting silent or underutilized for the better part of two years, the remote office is starting to really matter again. This means that IT won't just have to pay cursory attention to cleaning up the in-office experience, but will be pressed to deliver a 100 percent productivity experience in both the office and for work-from-home (or work-from-anywhere) users. This calls for complete end-to-end visibility through all the infrastructure you own and control to fully understand what performance from the office is going to look like when everybody comes back. We discovered at the beginning of the pandemic that one of the first sort of internal infrastructure to fall short on capacity VPN concentrators as everybody went home and had to connect back to corporate resources. What part of your office infrastructure stack will be most behind when IT is fully supporting office and anywhere-based productivity?? Is that going to be the wireless LAN? WAN capacity used up by concurrent desktop and conference-room video sessions? Is it going to be your firewall due to all those new SaaS apps we're starting to hear about?? Or, will it be a human-touch shortage as home-based equipment is brought back to the office environment for the first time in nearly two years? So, the reality of hybrid working is upon us — not just the vision — and having to really make in-office work as well or even better than it ever did before will be a top order for network teams well into the new year.
Adam Edwards
Chief Customer Officer, AppNeta

NEW TOOLS USE AI/ML

Enterprises will need to implement digital transformation projects that utilize AI to help them figure out what to focus on, where the problems are, and how to predict performance and capacity issues.
Mike Marks
Product Marketing, Aternity

We need to address the support of the remote worker. To that end, we are seeing a new breed of tools emerge that are based on AI and machine learning. These tools can identify, alert, and sometimes, heal, issues before the remote worker even knows there is a problem. While we have seen a consolidation of tools and platforms, I believe the hybrid approach to workforce enablement will continue to be the right approach for the foreseeable future.
Jeff Ton
Strategic IT Advisor, InterVision

TOOLS BECOME MORE EFFICIENT AT MOVING DATA

There is nothing more frustrating to WFH than tech issues or slow connectivity of applications. The more efficient an application is about moving data around, the better the experience and the more highly appreciated your product or service will be. With more devices connecting to wireless networks in homes and apartments, it becomes even more important for these applications to be efficient in moving data.
Dean Guida
CEO, Infragistics

TOOLS OFFER MORE COLLABORATION FEATURES

Remote work will cause teams using legacy monitoring, detection, and diagnostic systems to struggle, as in-person discussion and decision-making stops being possible. To address this, we'll see modern application performance tools offer better in-app collaboration features, which will supplant the dashboard-only tools we see today.
John Egan
CEO and Co-Founder, Kintaba

The hybrid work model will dominate in 2022 and therefore there will be an increased variety and usage of collaboration tools due to the global corporate adoption of BYOD and remote work.
Mike Marks
Product Marketing, Aternity

Many of the collaboration platforms added great functionality in 2021, enabling them to address the remote workforce and the in-office workforce. As we evolve into the hybrid workforce of the future, I think we will continue to see tools add functionality to try and make communication and collaboration as smooth and as efficient as possible.
Jeff Ton
Strategic IT Advisor, InterVision

INTERNET GAP

SWZD's 2021 Future of Remote Work study revealed workers' home internet connectivity is a problem for 69% of businesses based in rural areas. Only 12% of employees of companies in rural areas planned to work remotely after the pandemic ends, compared to ~30% in suburban and urban areas. The recent passage of the US infrastructure bill — which allocates billions of dollars to improving broadband infrastructure and improving rural connectivity — will help close the infrastructure gap and enable more workers to work remotely in 2022.
Peter Tsai
Head of Technology Insights, SWZD

FIRING THE CIO

2022 is the year CIOs lose or keep their jobs based on how they adapt to new ways of working and thinking. With examples like Facebook's October outage looming large, CEOs and Boards are increasingly worried about IT resiliency and are viewing downtime as a key threat to business continuity. CIOs and their teams are under pressure to adapt more quickly than ever before and take responsibility for a rising number of threats. In 2022 CIOs will need to answer questions like "is our company at risk of going down as well?" and "has IT taken the right steps to enable, secure and authenticate a largely hybrid/remote workforce?" In response, successful CIOs will start bringing more to the table to prove ROI and provide a "scorecard" for the company's tech stack — what is paying off, what is costing money, and what is an opportunity to innovate to make more money. Given that, ask yourself the question: Does your CIO have a scorecard for your company's technology stack? Does the CIO have a scorecard? If not, 2022 may well be the year CIOs get fired.
Christina Kosmowski
President, LogicMonitor

IT PROS SWITCH JOBS

Much has been written about the shift to remote work during the initial stages of the pandemic, and there's more to come. In 2022, businesses should expect great churn in the tech labor market. The 2022 State of IT report revealed that one quarter of IT professionals plan to look for or switch jobs in 2022, and among these job seekers, 86% will consider remote roles.
Peter Tsai
Head of Technology Insights, SWZD

TECH BUDGETS RISE

Tech budgets will continue to increase. Going into 2022, optimism abounds in the corporate world. As remote work continues to alter the business landscape, most companies (61%) expect their revenues to grow year-over-year (YoY) and most (53%) plan to increase tech budgets.
Peter Tsai
Head of Technology Insights, SWZD

Check back after the Holidays for more predictions about NPM, Cloud and Digital Transformation.