Whilst at the Enterprise 2.0 conference at Varese I had the pleasure of listening to Dr Norman Lewis speak about Digital Natives or Generation Y. Whilst the Varese conference was excellent, Dr Lewis’s session was the most engaging because he took a position that encouraged debate, rather than the usual spiel about how kids are great with technology these days and unless companies catch up no graduates will want to work with them.
Dr Lewis made the point that Gen Y is not particularly skilled in technology. Members of Gen Y do not see the tools they use to collaborate as ‘technology’ just as the older generation do not see cars as technology (whereas their grandparents probably did). According to Dr Lewis, “technology is the stuff that is invented after you are born”. Do Gen Y understand the software engineering behind Facebook, MySpace and MSN? Or how mobile phone networks allow them to send messages to each other? Maybe a tiny percentage do, but these are they ‘impressive’ ones who ‘get’ technology, rather than those who simply use everyday tools.
Dr Lewis points to the uptake of social software amongst Gen Y as due to an upbringing where everything is seen in the context of risk. Children grow up more in the presence of adults than in the presence of children, which leads to a bedroom culture rather than a street culture. This is encouraged by parents, but the children seek environments where they can self-express which leads to phenomenons such as MySpace. It is the same motivation that lies behind a teenage diary – simply expressed with different tools.
So what does this mean for Generation Y and Enterprise 2.0 in the workplace? If the motivation to use “Web 2.0″ in Generation Y is driven by a desire to self-express, this is not necessarily the same motivation within the workplace. If you follow Dr Lewis, the objectives of social software in the enterprise are completely different than those in the Gen Y consumer world.
So is Gen Y a red herring for Enterprise 2.0? There is still an issue. Change within an organisation is happening within the lifetime of an employee. Just as Generation X are struggling with new ways of communicating, so will Generation Y and they may have to re-skill several times throughout their career. We have not yet seen whether Gen Y can do this – just how good will they be at picking up the latest technology their kids are using when they are 40?
Whilst Dr Lewis has a point that the cultural expectations of Gen Y of how they will behave in the workplace is is just as much if not more of a challenge as opposed to the technical competence of Gen X – there are still challenges in terms of approach to communication. The point was made at E2.0 in Boston that the real difference is that Gen Y are comfortable using multiple tools to communicate whereas Gen X want a single tool for the job. Coach a Gen Xer to use a wiki and they will use it for everything, sometimes inappropriately.
At Wachovia’s presentation at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston, Pete Fields was passionate about how organisations really didn’t understand how serious the problem is of people retiring with tacit knowledge locked in their heads. He challenged the audience that we know this is happening, we’re not doing anything about it, and in five years what will you say you did given that you could see the problem. At Varese, the point was made by the panel that if a Baby Boomer doesn’t want to retire (given current economic circumstances!), the only thing stopping an organisation getting rid of him or her is the tacit knowledge in their head. Where is their incentive to share that knowledge?
What is common through all these threads is that the real question is one of culture. Irrespective of what tools the latest generation are comfortable with using or demanding in the workplace, organisations have to decide what sort of company they want to be. Do they want to be open, or closed? Flat or hierarchical? How do they want to encourage innovation? Depending on the answers to these questions, the sorts of tools they adopt, and the culture of the people they employ, will become pragmatic answers, rather than using any technology for its own sake.
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