Mike Gotta had a post on his blog yesterday where he talked about a serious vendor/user mismatch brewing: IBM and Microsoft continue to be e-mail-centric in their messaging offerings while young workers live in a real-time communications world.
This work habit mismatch is on its way to becoming a huge problem. In the past, vendors and enterprises told workers, "Here's the system -- here's its UI -- get used to it." However, that form of systems imperiousness no longer works. There are now many ways to gather information and communicate in this digital world, and people are picking what they're most comfortable with. To give one small example, yesterday the Collaboration and Content Strategies team had a briefing with Microsoft, so we were all taking notes. I looked around, and I was typing into a Word document on my laptop, Karen Hobert was typing into Lotus Notes, and Mike was writing notes on paper. (And, interestingly enough, one of the young Microsoft product managers -- in an offhand way -- commented on Mike's use of that old paper technology). We're all analysts, all working in the same practice, but using three different ways to capture the same information.
Other examples of these different ways of gathering and generating information abound. According to studies by the Pew Internet Project, teenagers are much more inclined to have blogs and read them than their parents. The makers of Kryptonite locks got in trouble several years ago when blogs were all abuzz about the fact that it was easy to open them by using a Bic pen. The company didn't respond for weeks due to the simple fact that no one in upper management read blogs. It was only when the story made it to the traditional media that the company realized it had a problem.
A young worker that lives in IM, blogs, and wikis is a different person from the Baby Boomer that deals with the world via e-mail and web sites. There are not only different attitudes at work, but different ways of communicating and parsing information. Enterprises need to realize they really do have a diverse workforce -- and look for tools that support those differences, rather than suppress them. Otherwise, they will think they're communicating with employees and customers when they aren't.
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