I’ve recently been introduced to the idea of ‘search styles’. Despite using Google or other search engines almost every day of our lives, it seems – if they’re anything like me – that most of us don’t really think about how we search for information. It seems natural: you log on, you type in the name of the theme park you’re going to at the weekend, and after a few clicks, you’ve managed to find the directions you were after.
No so for the younger generation, or so I have found. The theme park example above is taken from real life. I asked my 11 year-old daughter Catherine to carry out the same search and instead of typing in ‘Diggerland’, she asked Google ‘show me how to get to Diggerland’. The result was exactly what we needed.
My daughter’s generation has grown up in a cyberspace world and intuitively knows what to do to get the right information from Internet. Like speaking and walking, for them it’s a natural skill that they have always had – unlike those of us that remember a world before Google and Facebook and had to learn this skills consciously.
But what does this mean for the future of business? The new style of searching fits nicely with the Cloud-based model as both work on the premise of open communication. There’s none of the structure that older generations have had to adapt to when using the Internet and corporate networks.
However, this new mentality may lead to new challenges as well. For example, do existing systems need to be updated or even re-engineered to support more flexible search and use of information? Cloud and virtualised platforms are already in a position to support this but organisations with more traditional systems will need to consider how they will create a user-friendly environment for future employees. Security is another area that may need to be re-thought. How will a generation used to getting all the information it needs right away react to a world of passwords and user authentication?
Of course the younger generation will have to adapt to certain processes as well – no one is going to eliminate mandatory data security measures just for the sake of user convenience. But it’s really brought home to me the human implications of evolving technologies.
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Hubert Yoshida on 27 Jul 2010 at 5:51 pm
Bruce Chumley of Strategic Alliances and I were talking about the capabilities and expectations of your daughter’s generation of data users the other day. Bruce said that he used to worry about how he could prepare his children for the world of IT, but now he worries about how he can prepare IT to meet the challenges that this generation will bring.