The generation Y and Cyber are going to hit the market soon, are you ready?
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Written by Rejean Bourgault (Canada); Edited by Olivier Adam (Singapore), Co-founders of 5Deka – All Rights Reserved
Are you ready? Does your enterprise realize that the Cyber Generation (15 years old or less; also called Generation internet), is already on the market? They already represent a significant portion of your sales but they have completely different buying behaviors and expectations. They will also, very soon (in the next 5-10 years), become employees in your company. In fact, 15% of the workforce today is already composed of employees that are from Generation Y (29 years old or less) and that generation, especially those in the range of 15 to 20 years old are coming in companies with brand new sets of requirements when it comes to doing work.
They are multitasking and they spend a lot more time on MSN than on e-mail. In a recent survey done in February 2009, out of 420 students that are between the age of 13 and 16 in a private school in Canada; 98% of them had an MSN address. This in itself might not be that surprising anymore. What is surprising though is that most companies in the market today block MSN and Yahoo Messenger on their corporate computers. Are you offering them an alternative? Or you are simply blocking Instant Messaging (IM) to them? Do you realize that when a teenage boy first meet a girl, he does not leave his phone number anymore but he gives her his MSN address instead? At the Gartner conference in San Francisco in April 2007, a speaker related a story where 2 top graduates, during the interview with a very large and prestigious firm, asked if they had a corporate policy to block IM, the response from the potential employer was yes. Their answer to the job offer then became: No thanks then!
Today, in large corporations, the CIO and its IS-IT team are getting a lot of pressure by their telecommunication suppliers and software companies to implement Unified Communications (UC). The premise of UC is to offer collaboration tools to employees, such as Instant Messaging and Presence (the ability to find out if another employee is currently available, busy, on the phone, etc.). The challenge for the CIO in these situations is to determine the ROI (return on investment) for UC. The problem is that we are looking at this the wrong way. First, the right people that we should talk to are in the Human Resources (HR) department. They are the ones responsible to attract new employees and they are the ones, more than anyone else in the corporation, which sees the challenge of attracting employees from the next Generation. But not only they have to attract them, they are also responsible to retain talent and provide adequate tools for their development. Today, we are taking graduates out of University and College and we give them a desk phone, a computer and an e-mail address. Wake up please! This is not what the graduates expect at all. He (or she) already has his laptop that is probably more powerful (and has a nicer design as well) than the computer you’re offering them, a mobile phone (probably a smart phone with calendar, e-mails and web browsing) and uses MSN and SMS all the time to communicate with friends and family. I am sorry, but forget the ROI in a situation like this for UC. The ability to attract and retain talent is priceless and your enterprise must get on this ASAP. Think about it carefully, tomorrow morning someone comes to you and say: for the next 7 days, you have a choice of either e-mails or a phone to do your work. Which one would you choose? If you chose e-mails, then you must start implementing Secure Instant Messaging and Presence for your company. The next Generation is already demanding it. Do you need an ROI to justify e-mail or internet access today? The same goes for UC.