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“The world is not going to snap back to being exactly like it was before this crisis happened. We’re going to come out of this into a different world.” – Jamie Metzl, author of Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity

Every other email and social media piece I see talks about the impact of the COVID 19 virus on our lives. In a few short weeks every one of us has begun to experience the effect of this pandemic. Every aspect of our lives have been turned upside down, our work, our leisure, our social interactions, our critical services, our politics, law enforcement and the way we worship communally. Shelter in-place seems to be the only way to slow down the spread of the virus while our health care system tries to catch up. Changes of this magnitude are also expected to continue for the greater part of this year.

This is a global pandemic, so no nation can isolate themselves from the rest of the world. Every nation will see the peak at some time. To their credit countries are working together. Despite closing their borders to slow down the spread of the virus by asymptomatic carriers; countries are sharing their knowledge, medical supplies, and working together to create new tests and effective therapeutics and vaccines. Russia and China have sent medical supplies to the US, and the US has promised to send supplies to Italy, Spain and France when new manufacturing capabilities come online.

I hear and see a lot of compassion and support coming from companies and individuals. Companies diverting resources and changing priorities to ensure the safety of employees, partners, and customer as a first priority over sales and profits. The reality is that some business will not weather this storm and many jobs and careers will be lost forever as the nature of work will change and new skill sets will have to be developed and acquired. In San Francisco where there is huge homeless population, the city is setting up shelters, and individuals are setting up food distribution sites. The US government is sending checks to individuals below a certain income level to help them pay for living expenses. In the long term this may lead to Universal Income as part of the different world that Metzl refers to above.

IT will go through a major change. The digital transformation that began to take root in the past few years will accelerate in response to the new demands for technologies, business models and social interactions. Data and analytics will be key to developing solutions to these problems.  DevOps and DataOps tools will need to be continually updated to respond to these new demands. Orchestration and automation will be key enablers for agility. Transparency, communication, open source communities will also be key. While IT is focused today on supporting the new remote workforce, they must be laying plans for the world after COVID.

This experience will also accelerate technologies like quantum computers. Instead of solving arcane mathematical problems that no one really cares about, quantum computing is being made available to researchers and deployed in genome studies, optimization of supply chains and first responders. Visual analytics is being used to track the spread of infections and enforce social distancing. New analytic tools will be developed, and new storage technologies will also be developed to respond to the resulting data explosion. In the near term, storage demand is expected to decline as we enter the expected recession, but demand should spike up with the recovery later in the year. In the meantime, a lot of attention is being given to preserving the supply chain and inventories across various regions.

Telemedicine is an area where I personally see acceleration. The next appointments with my doctors at Stanford will be by video conference through their MyHealth app. My home glucose monitor readings will be uploaded to them through an iphone app. For now, I upload photos of my temperature and blood pressure reading. I still need to get an O2 Oxygen monitor reader which I understand is important to monitor the effects of the COVID 19 on pulmonary functions. There are applications that can monitor all these reading and more remotely. Tele-medicine will help to reduce the burden on our heroic first responders and medical care personal. I am amazed and tremendously grateful for their dedication despite the risk to themselves and to their families.

On the home front, the different world will find most of us working remotely from home. Tools like Microsoft Teams and ZOOM help us to connect remotely. My manager hosts a vCoffee on Vemio to keep us connected. There will be more family bonding as schooling will be done remotely. This will take us back to the days of the family farms when I was a child. Children worked with the parents and learned their values and ethics in the home and at work. We had home cooked meals and we talk around the dinner table. Many schools are sending home computers and tablets and carriers are making more services available and affordable for lower income families. Children and teachers will become experts in the use of remote computers. Parents will have the opportunity be more involved with their children’s education and may even learn from the new knowledge that is being developed in our schools. Education will be a lifelong experience.

Some of the technologies that are tracking, monitoring and analyzing the virus are necessary today but will need to be reined in or strictly governed when this crisis is over. Hopefully this situation will pass, and we will preserve the care and compassion and innovation that we are seeing now. The world will certainly be different, and we must plan for it to be better world.