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Does your organization “digg” Enterprise 2.0?

June 17, 2008

Some time ago, it made big news when the first Baby Boomer started collecting Social Security. It is now big business to advise Baby Boomers on retirement strategies, retirement communities, places to retire to, etc. Baby Boomers (ages 44-62) are the biggest workforce out there today, but it won’t be that way for long. Gen X (ages 29-43) doesn’t have enough workers to replace the retiring Baby Boomers. And those from Gen Y or the Millennials (ages 8-28), who are coming into the workforce for the first time, have very different expectations of the workplace and a very different view of technology. After all, Gen Y has been around since the birth of the internet and has grown up with online connectivity.

Surveys show (and probably this would be no surprise to most of you) that Millennials are the ones who have embraced Web 2.0 with open arms compared to the other two groups. Gen X is a close second to Millennials when it comes to using different Web 2.0 technologies. But Millennials are more likely to use Instant Messaging, use Social Networking Sites, download digital media, and play online games. Millennials are more apt to send or receive multimedia messages on their mobile phones, send or receive text messages on their mobile phones, etc. Most Millennials are constantly connected to technology, be it their MP3 players, mobile phones, etc. Millennials also tend to use a very different language when it comes to sending text messages or IM – they have many different acronyms like for example, BRB means “Be right back”, and they tend to use emoticons i.e. characters like :-) and :-( , quite liberally. Millennials have been using social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook for quite a while. They DIGG stuff or BURY it! They share bookmarks via del.icio.us. They “twit” interesting content! They are more likely to publish a video to YouTube or podcast or publish a blog or web page.

As Millennials enter the workforce, they are going to be very keen on continuing to use Web 2.0 tools that they use constantly in their personal lives. Matter of fact, some surveys show that a good chunk of the population that uses sites like Facebook or MySpace tend to visit those sites several times daily and they tend to hang around for a while on each visit. So what does this mean for the enterprise?

Organizations and companies that want to attract and retain technology-savvy talent need to look at the use of Enterprise 2.0 technologies in their environments. Social networking tools should be embraced with appropriate governance. Consider leveraging the power of mashups to integrate different applications and present them in a slick interface. Look at re-designing applications keeping in mind that Gen Y tends to view the web and web sites and experiences quite differently. Some statistics suggest that Millennials tend to get easily bored and will not wait for a web page that takes longer than 3 seconds to download. Millennials tend to migrate away from companies they perceive to be stodgy or behind the times. Millennials are very comfortable with virtual worlds – how could you leverage that organizationally? Leverage the power of crowd-sourcing and folksonomies. If Baby Boomers are retiring, and there’s not enough of Gen X to replace them, how would you attract Gen Y to those jobs? Are there ways of using Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis and podcasts to capture the knowledge in the minds of Baby Boomers before they retire so as not to lose all that precious capital?

Ready or not, the Millennials are coming and the workplace is changing! The question of interest is, “Are they coming soon to your organization” and are you ready? Will they “digg” your use of Enterprise 2.0 technologies?

Written by Raveen Rajavarma · Filed Under Technology 

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