This guest post comes courtesy of Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at Zapthink.There’s an invasion coming. In fact, it’s already under way, and you probably haven’t already realized that you’re
about to be taken over.
That’s right –
Generation Y has entered the workforce (as anemic as it currently is), and is bound to become the dominant part of your enterprise within the next 10-15 years. What does this mean for your organization? How are the needs of Gen Y different from that of existing markets? And why does this have anything to do with Enterprise IT?
The answers are below, but rest assured, the emergence of
Millennials in the workforce is every bit a
crisis point for your IT planning as dealing with the
downfall of EA Frameworks and
Cyberwarfare, albeit with most likely a positive ending.
What makes Gen Y different?Wikipedia’s Generation Y entry provides some needed detail on what exactly we’re dealing with here:
Generation Y, also known as the Millennial Generation, Generation Next or Net Generation, describes the demographic cohort following Generation X. Its members are often referred to as Millennials or Echo Boomers … commentators have used birth dates ranging somewhere from the mid-1970s to the early 2000s, but most agree on birth dates between 1982 and 1995. Members of this generation are called Echo Boomers, due to the significant increase in birth rates between 1982–1995, and because most of them are children of baby boomers. The term Generation Y first appeared in an August 1993 Ad Age editorial to describe teenagers of the day
Okay, so they’re
baby boomer spawn. Big deal? Well, not necessarily. Without exception, Gen Y’ers (let’s use the term
Millennials from here on to simplify the writing) have grown up entirely in the
information age. They don’t know a world without computers, cell phones, and MTV.
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were already fighting by the time they were born, and the term
minicomputer never even entered their lexicon. But what makes the Millennials most relevant for the enterprise is that their experience of IT is primarily with
the vast rate of change happening on the consumer side, rather than in the enterprise.
It’s not just an inherent technical fluency that separates Millennials from their peers. Milennials emerged in a world where instant communication in the form of email,
texting,
instant messaging,
social networks, online gaming, virtual worlds like
World of Warcraft and
Second Life, and online sharing platforms such as YouTube were the norm. Because much of their lives were conducted in the public sphere, the notion of personal privacy has eroded. Will Millennials have the same respect for corporate information as that of their less publicly verbose colleagues?
The far biggest impact on the emergence of Millennials in the workforce is that their expectations of what enterprise IT can do for them and the company is very different than their older peers.
Likewise, Millennials leverage the power of these mass communication and sharing platforms to revolutionize the way marketing and information sharing is done.
Viral marketing,
flash mobbing, internet
memes, and spontaneous meetups are not only the new social cliques and in-culture of the generation, but the primary way trends are shaped.
This is all backed up by research. In a seminal report by
Junco and Mastrodicasa, they cited the following results of a survey of the Millennial group:
College students ... used technology at higher rates than people from other generations. In their survey, they found that 97 percent of these students owned a computer, 94 percent owned a cell phone, and 56 percent owned a MP3 player. They also found that students spoke with their parents an average of 1.5 times a day about a wide range of topics. Other findings in the Junco and Mastrodicasa survey revealed 76 percent of students used instant messaging, and 92 percent of those reported multitasking while IMing.
But the far biggest impact on the emergence of Millennials in the workforce is that
their expectations of what enterprise IT can do for them and the company is very different than their older peers. In the eyes of Millennials, they
can get sophisticated IT stuff done without the IT department — in fact, many already have. So enterprise IT departments: Prepare to win the hearts and minds of the Millennials, lest they find competition for your services.
How will this impact Enterprise IT?Millennials see IT as a tool to get things done. For them, however, they have a choice between using the tools of their daily lives (mobile devices, online applications, social networks) or the tools of their business lives (what we currently consider to be enterprise IT). As such, organizations need to understand the core needs of this critical user group:
How can enterprise IT address these needs? Fortunately,
both the technology and know-how exist to solve these problems. As is often the case, the solution is most often design and architecture-centric and less-so technology centric. If someone sells you a Millennial Integration App, you should run quickly in the other direction. Instead, you should adjust your IT development and operations practices to meet the above needs:
This sounds like a tall order, but it shouldn’t be anything new for enterprise IT departments that are already looking ahead to the next generation of applications and value creation for the enterprise.
The ZapThink takeThe impact of Millennials entering the workforce becomes a crisis point only if organizations turn a blind eye to the different experiences and needs of this age group. The days of enterprise IT departments having sole control of the pace and scope of IT innovation in the organization are long gone.
Millennials already know that they have sophisticated, highly usable, and
instant IT capabilities available at their fingertips and online, so why should they be bothered when the comparatively slower and less-sophisticated enterprise IT department can’t get their needs met? A smart enterprise IT department will realize that internal as well as external market forces impact the scope of what they need to get done.
Those that ignore the changing internal dynamics of the workforce will face a crisis point when the new generation takes increasingly more senior management positions. Those that see the emergence of this savvy audience as a good excuse to increase the pace of innovation will not only save their own jobs, but continue to make the enterprise IT department a champion and engine for innovation in the enterprise.
This guest post comes courtesy of Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at Zapthink.
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