I’m finishing up Mobility Field Day 7 this week and there’s been some exciting discussion here around a lot of technology. I think my favorite, and something I’m going to talk about more, is the continuing battle between 5G and Wi-Fi. However, there’s a lot going on that I figured I’d bring up to whet your appetite for the videos.

• What is mission critical? When you think about all the devices that are in your organization that absolutely must work every time what does that look like? And what are you prepared to do to make them work every time? If it’s a safety switch or some other kind of thing that prevents loss of life are you prepared to spend huge amounts of money to make it never fail?
• Operations teams don’t need easier systems. They need systems that remove complexity. The difference in those two things is subtle but important. Easier means that things are simplified to the point of almost being unusable. Think Apple Airport or even some Meraki devices. Whereas reduced complexity means that you’ve made the up front configuration easy but enabled the ability to configure other features in different places. Maybe that’s by giving your engineers the ability to log in to an Advanced dashboard or something like that.
• When you’re trying to figure out where your audience is on a subject, always aim slightly above their technical level. If all goes well you will pull them up to where you want them and they’ll appreciate the opportunity to stretch their thinking to meet you there. If not you’ll provide them lots of great material to learn about when they get there later.

Tom’s Take

Technology changes quickly but the way we teach it doesn’t need to if we do it right the first time. By taking the time to aim high and educate instead of retelling something we’ve already said a few times we create content that endures.