The pace of change in enterprise communications and collaboration -- and the need to respond to it -- is fast and getting faster, as attendees of Enterprise Connect 2018 indicated in our annual post-show survey.
When asked the primary reason for attending Enterprise Connect, 62% of survey respondents said they did so to "prepare for new/emerging technologies that will impact my enterprise soon." This is a 10% jump from last year, when that option garnered 52% of responses.
While the need to prepare for new and emerging technologies exerted greater pull on attendees compared to 2017, the opportunity for professional development and to keep skills sets current had less of a draw. While 23% of attendees selected personal career/skills criteria as the primary reason for attending EC18, this response rate dropped from 18% in 2017.
When looked at these two data points together, you could theorize that understanding the skills required for dealing with new and emerging technologies is more important than maintaining current skill sets. In fact, nearly half of our respondents said they strongly agreed that the skills to do their jobs are changing "significantly and rapidly." At 49%, this is a 11% increase from the 2017 response.
These results are particularly interesting when framed by a discussion of the inescapability of the cloud for communications professionals. As I discuss my EC post on these survey results, many of you are no longer looking at cloud simply as a move from premises-based systems to cloud services but rather as an opportunity wherever and whenever possible to improve your communications and collaboration.
As an example, one of our Enterprise Summit panelists, Jason Kasch, CIO with Structural Group, has tied his company's entire vision to the cloud. Read my EC post to learn more about his rationale and more of my thoughts on this new reality.
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