Digital Natives in Our Midst
If there’s anyone under 30 working in your company, you’ve got Digital Natives. Marc Prensky coined this term in 2001, in a paper titled, “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.” His starting point: “today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.” Things need to change, and they need to change fast. Since 2001, many of those students have graduated, and they’re working for you.
Digital natives grew up immersed in technology, according to Prensky, while digital immigrants adopted the new technology later in life. Why does this matter? “As Digital Immigrants learn to adapt to their environment,” Prensky writes, “they always retain, to some degree, their ‘accent,’ that is, their foot in the past..... Our Digital Immigrant instructors... are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language.”
It’s worse than that. Many teachers either have yet to immigrate or have no intention of doing so. Business is no better off. Today’s organizations and management systems are not designed for either the new way of work that information and communications technologies have enabled or the new employees these technologies have helped to create.
This was a core topic at last week’s Seattle Innovation Symposium, an intense, invitation-only summit of educators and business technology leaders led by Harvard’s Rob Austin (Rob chairs Harvard's exec ed program for CIOs) and the University of Washington’s Dick Nolan. (The video from this year's Symposium isn't up yet, but you'll find both video and audio from previous years here.) A panel moderated by Michael Eisenberg of UW’s I-School explored the fundamental question of just how different these workers really are, as well as the benefits and challenges those differences represent.
One of the more intriguing issues raised was the fact that Digital Natives view as “co-workers” anyone within their network who can help them solve a problem. While this may be a wonderful way to bring new ideas into the firm, it also exposes proprietary information as workers seek to more fully define the problem space they’re working in. “We’ve never before seen sub-groups working across organizational boundaries to advance the interests of the sub-group at the expense of the corporation,” said Wharton Business School Professor Eric Clemons. Few companies are prepared to deal with these issues in any comprehensive way.
It was great to see so much quality thought on this topic from some of our universities’ leading thinkers. I'll share more from the Symposium in future posts. In the meantime, for tips on managing these new employees and spanning the gaps between them and the Baby Boomers, check out our collection of articles on managing multiple generations in today's workforce.
Previous Post: Web 2.0 and Social Networking for Business: Take the PlungeNext Post: Can Big Companies Innovate?
Most Discussed Posts
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.
Sponsored Links
