Techno Musings

To sound a bit like Paul Revere: The Millennials are coming! The Millennials are coming!  Most say the Millennials are the replacement to the Boomer generation in terms of size, estimates range from 70M to 80M individuals who will enter the workforce over the next decade.  What is clear is that this generation will significantly reshape the workforce.  Topics like reverse mentoring, or completely different experiences of privacy, and different compensation models will become something that society at large and corporate America specifically has to cope with.  For instance this generation, because of being utterly immersed in social networking technologies, will have finally divined intellectually and emotionally what is needed for mass peer-to-peer trust relationships.

What I really want to focus on starts with the fact another name of the Millennials are the “Digital Natives”.  Just like my generation has never grown up without the Television, this new generation has never grown up without the Internet.  Some of the concepts of reverse mentoring take advantage of this very fact to train older generations in the workforce about emerging new trends in technology from these Digital Natives.  Another facet of the Digital Natives, their ease of interacting with all that is online, or what is often called “cloud” services today.  Facebook, Google Docs, iTunes, and YouTube are all examples of widely deployed cloud services and our Digital Natives are just like fish in the sea swimming from service to service.  They swim in the digital matrix and have Internet gills allowing them breathe effortlessly.  Concerns, questions and comments about dealing with the complexities of where their data is stored, or if they need to even have a physical copy, or, or, or have mostly been emotionally resolved by this generation.  Mind you I’m not proposing that this group is insensitive to present issues regarding the cloud like security, data safety, reliability, etc., merely that they are extremely comfortable with cloud concepts and instead of standing in the way, they will work to ensure all of the kinks are ironed out. It is the previous generations, like mine, who have emotional hangups and are trying to make sense out of this new world constructed by they successors.

In my last post I expressed some of my personal hangups about cloud services, and I would argue that these hangups are more than personal, they are actually generational.  (In fact I just had a great conversation with someone who deployed a SaaS offering to regular office workers and after the successful deployment was asked: where is my data?  So these hangups are very real issues.)  This is leading to my fundamental point: Gen-X-ers and Boomers are bringing cloud solutions to market and missing a key issue.  They are missing the fact that they must resolve emotionally oriented generational hangups to be truly successful.  By learning how to resolve emotional concerns about data safety, security, etc. I think that we will be part way there as a society that is more able to accept deployment of data at large on clouds. However, this emotional learning must also come by embracing our successors the Digital Natives.  This implies that those in generations older can perhaps gain an “artificial lung” of sorts and learn how to stay submerged in the world of the Digital Natives, not worrying about their hangups.