Please,

I'm not going to gut our business processes to suit the fancy of the least trained, least productive, and least experienced members of the workforce. By the time these children become worth something, they are going to realize that my approach is better than their approach. Please take your arrogant hype and stuff it. Better yet, sell it to my competitors.

Being flexible to accomodate new workforces is nothing new. But one reality that the millenials will have to learn is that a business cannot drop any software and move to a new model just because it's the newest and flashiest. This is the struggle I forsee in the next decade. We have raised these young adults to consider all things disposable.

Free and/or short lived use of Web 2.0 systems are great for personal use or very small businesses. Processes and Prcedures and the internal software used to facilitate them are in place for a reason; they produce reliable and predicatable results to customers and they provide much needed information to the leaders of the organizaiton. Try achieving either of those with an every changing mix of SaaS/social networkings tools.

Yes, we will need to rethink how we deliver software for productivity, but we will also have to retrain this new workforce at how to look at software.

I am almost "Millennial" myself and have not observed this conflict of cultures. Perhaps the issue is more pronounced in the American workplace, inflated by the emphasis on extrovert behaviors of the pop culture and the long history of office automation and productivity software. In terms of the adoption of software, the American companies seem to be a whole generation ahead of the "rest of the world" and have developed stable processes before the mind melting time of the MTV, the empowering PC and the I-want-everything-right-now 80s. Viewing systems as a medium rather than a hierarchical set of processes might help.
By the way, the Web 2.0 is still a UI to a distributed system, nothing more.

As a fifty something with two children, our generation has built and promoted a culture of non stop entertainment for our children, it appears – from the Nintendos to the iPhones – from arcade games to big screen TVs.

Our word processing software, starting from "cut and paste" to being able to incorporate entire bodies of someone else's work, has put our children’s brains out on vacation. The flood of documents and knowledge available on the Internet makes the idea of authoring your own article quaint and cumbersome at best, a stupid waste of time at worst.

As a result of the ease of travelling on someone else’s (often free) work, the Millennials appear to have short attention spans for anything that is not immediately entertaining, and no tolerance for the inevitable pain of the journey that is life.

Developing software applications is an expensive business that gets even more expensive as the user base gets smaller and smaller. When we build to the market of one, there is no standardization, no ability to train, or any form of consistent defect tracking and fixing approach, and no predictability of behavior. The software built for a market of one necessarily has to serve a team of one. And large and ambitious endeavors, as well as large and complicated enterprises are seldom made up of teams of one.

Maybe it is only in our culture, here in the US with its focus on individuality that we have a Millennial problem, while in other parts of the world, regimented, skilled, trained, dedicated and motivated teams will build the enterprise applications of the future – recognizing that work is not always entertaining but is necessary, but that the fruits of effort are always rewarding.

Or maybe we are exporting our way of life to the rest of the world, creating a global Millennial workforce where business as we know it, on the scale we know it, will break down into small economic enterprises that do not need heavy metal systems and mass market interfaces but are small ecosystems with small IT footprints and small supplier and customer sets.

My own feeling is that the behemoths of corporate enterprises of today will ultimately give way to smaller, nimbler, “free” enterprises that will use IT in a different way than the way we have been thinking about it, and serving Millennial customers, suppliers and IT staff alike in a better way than the standard IT sweatshop – primarily fueled by H-1 labor today. Because those enterprises will be smaller, conceiving of enterprise applications will be easier. Because their IT teams are smaller, coordination and collaboration will be easier. Sharing and data exchanges will take the place of storing and hoarding. Data quality is only guaranteed by sources and not by brokers. Applications will be like iPhone applets. Applications are downloaded for the duration of an interest and discarded after that interest has been served.

Having programmed my homework on mainframes while at graduate school in the nineteen seventies and now carrying a iPhone to speed my way through New York city’s subway system, sights, and places to eat, I look forward to a future that is exciting even if it is dramatically different than the one I have embraced.

I've read this report as well similar ones and while the true need for enterprise transparencies and collaboration will need to be improved I think most of this age group is in for a rude wake up to how corporate america functions and how political things are. How you actually have to prove out a cost benefit to secure needed budget etc.

Not every company is like Google and most have very entrenched HR and security guidelines that are still adjusting to the mobile workforce.

I think after a couple years of moving job - job for the latest perks they settle down - realize they need a steady paycheck and stop pushing the boundary.

Gen X here and we learned this the hard way in the 90's. Your lucky to have a job somewhere with a flexible work arrangement in the current economy.