Everest Group’s Joshi has a similar take and cites specifically the industrial metaverse as being overhyped.
“The promise has been higher than the actual implementations,” he says.
There are definite use cases, Joshi believes, such as for design and maintenance of shop floors, with digital twins of high-end devices, and training. However, challenges around infrastructure costs, people training, interoperability, and poor UX has marred its adoption.
8. Multicloud
Many CIOs embrace multicloud but Joshi says few are getting all the benefits that this cloud strategy has promised.
“The [enterprise] objective to have uniformly synched interoperable workloads for multiclouds that allow them to address vendor lock-in has not worked,” he says. “Most enterprises are multicloud, but their bet on cloud vendors rarely change. They do not necessarily interoperate their workloads across different cloud platforms either.”
So while CIOs are more intentionally pursuing multicloud strategies, whereas previously many had found themselves there as a matter of near happenstance, interoperability and other key issues are adding complexity to the calculus.
9. Electric vehicles
Granted, this is not a technology that CIOs usually deal with, but some CIOs still put it on their list of overhyped tech.
Chris Grebisz, CIO of technology company Welocalize, is one of them. He described having to figure out how to put his Tesla into neutral when he took it to a car wash for the first time, saying that such routine actions have to be relearned with EVs.
And as he’s doing that, he’s finding that the user interface isn’t as intuitive as promoted.
“It’s going from 30 years of driving a car to something like an iPad, and I’m a tech guy,” he says. “Everything needs to be figured out. I have to go and read the manual.”
Grebisz says he now considers his Tesla a “transportation appliance” rather than a car, a mindset shift that helps him with the change management required when shifting from a conventional car to an EV.
He notes that it was a dramatic change, suggesting that true digital natives might find the shift easier to make.
The experience has also given him insight into how workers feel when a technology disrupts longstanding workflows.
“I was just really surprised by my experience. I thought it was going to be a lot easier,” he adds.
10. Green energy
David Williamson, CIO of Abzena, a life sciences company, goes even further and puts green energy in the overhyped tech category.
To be clear: He’s not against it. In fact, he, too, has a Tesla and has solar energy for his home.
It’s those personal experiences that led him to conclude green energy isn’t the silver bullet that some promise. To start, he — like Grebisz — found there’s a learning curve to driving his EV.
“My biggest complaint is they change the user interface all the time,” he says, offering that he has “watched a lot of videos to know what to do with the car.”
He has also found that both hot and cold weather wear down the battery, “so you think you have a certain range but you don’t.”
He has had a similar experience with solar panels, saying “the promise and the reality are different.
They get dirty and then lose efficiency, so they have to be cleaned. And the difference in their summertime and wintertime performance is significant.
And then there’s the surprise costs, with Williamson noting that he had to pay to connect to the grid and still gets charged a delivery fee.
Williamson says these experiences remind him that “we underestimate the impact of technology on the individual” and that “there’s gotchas with the technologies that aren’t discussed.”
