Generation Y. It’s a term that keeps coming up. Before that it was Digital Natives, and I’m sure different companies and areas have their own terms. What makes these guys so special eh?
Well I guess the most basic answer is that these are the guys that our companies will be employing from this point on. If you work in an internal IS group like me, that makes them our customers.
For anyone born after 1984 or so, social web applications like Facebook and messaging tools like MSN or Sykpe are part and parcel of life. Of course there are plenty of other examples, and I’m sure that these things are just as important for some of us slightly older types. But it’s Generation Y that really sum up this new wave of technology savvy people who use and rely on technology far more than ever before. It’s this consumerisation of the workforce and the tools they demand that cause problems in enterprise IT.
For the past 10-15 years the primary drivers for many enterprise IT groups has been simple: Reduce your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and then hopefully earn the opportunity to use some of those savings to deliver extra value to the business.
This lead to the usual standardising of services to reduce complexity and and consolidation of those services to further reduce management and support costs.
In effect this means standardising and locking down what people can do to server the greater good. It’s never really been a popular move with end users, but from a business standpoint it has made a lot sense.
The times are a changin’ however. The need to attract and retain Generation Y is starting to have a profound effect on these old strategies. With technology now playing such an important part of peoples lives its becoming a factor in peoples decisions about where they work. The traditional locked down computers, controlled applications and restricted Internet access just isn’t going to cut it with people used to communicating and collaborating live online.
What does this mean for IT? Well for a start we’ll need to be a lot more open in our approaches. The problem is that often the old drivers for low TCO etc still stand. So in the short term at least there are some compromises to be made.