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CIO Executive Council

A Peer-Advisory Service and Professional Association for CIOs

Webcast: In the Google Apps Cloud: How to Achieve Your Business Objectives

Dec 3rd, '09, 1 - 2 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)

Join Council member Brent Hoag, Director, Global IT, at JohnsonDiversey, as he discusses the adoption of Google Apps which has helped meet four corporate goals; sustainability, simplification, increased employee productivity and global collaboration.

Webcast: Collaboration Initiatives: Benchmarks & Best Practices

Dec 15th, '09, 4 - 5 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)

Join Council members Ruth Thorpe, VP & CIO at the U.S. Pharmaceutical Operations of Sanofi-Aventis, and Gary Kuyper, CIO at Bethany Christian Services, as they speak about their collaboration initiatives and experiences in how and why they chose the social networking and collaboration tools they are using and their business goals for collaboration, and facing culture change challenges.

Data Overview: Collaboration Initiatives Field Guide: Benchmarks & Best Practices

This appendix to the Council Field Guide provides an analysis which discusses benchmarks for collaboration IT implementation costs, adoption rates and payoffs. The overview identifies top IT and business goals and satisfaction rates for collaboration initiatives as well as best practices and lessons learned for implementing collaboration IT.

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Companies Wrestle With Tech Demands of Younger Workers

IT can help business prepare now for technology and cultural changes Gen Y workers will bring

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Leading IT with the Next Generation

Scalet, senior vice president and CIO of Merck & Co., noticed that as his daughter studied, she simultaneously listened to her iPod, sent text messages and browsed through pages of the Facebook social network.

"How she will work in the future will be very different from how we work today," Scalet said. "She is going to expect [collaboration] tools ... to be able to work. What scared me is that we don't think that way today as corporations. We think as baby boomers [about] this very traditional, structured, formal [work environment]."

Scalet is among a growing number of IT executives who are in the early stages of planning on how to prepare their companies to adequately meet the needs of the 80 million children of baby boomers who are now or will soon enter the workforce.

Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics, a book about how the Internet and mass collaboration will dramatically affect the global economy, said that he has recently been studying the work habits of this next generation of employees. For businesses to create and manage what Tapscott describes as "the next-generation enterprise," they will have to find a way to adapt to new types of technologies that younger workers are increasingly demanding.

"If you have generation that is coming into the workforce that has grown up using new collaboration models, business ought to care," Tapscott said. "[The collaboration models] are going to dominate the 21st century marketplace. If you don't understand that, you're going to fail economically."

Tapscott and Scalet were among a group of experts who spoke Thursday about how businesses must now begin preparing for technology and cultural changes that the next generation of workers will bring to the fore. They spoke at a press conference in New York announcing that the BSG Alliance Corp. has acquired Tapscott's company, New Paradigm.

Merck's Scalet said that while he is not yet sure how technologies will evolve to meet the needs of the new workforce, he does know that he will have to "think very differently about how I'm going to build future capabilities. This next generation of employees will pull corporations toward it. If you don't have that capability in place, they will pack up and go someplace that does. IT has to take a leadership role."