Companies Wrestle With Tech Demands of Younger Workers

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

By Heather Havenstein
Mon, December 03, 2007

Computerworld — Chris Scalet first realized that the next generation of workers will require drastically different IT tools and policies when he recently watched his 20-year-old daughter studying for her college classes.

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."

Continue Reading

Are you ready to diversify? The business needs of companies are changing often and rapidly. Open virtualization offers compelling business advantages and shows even greater potential as companies choose diversification over proprietary vendor lock-in.
Find out how your IT department's IT asset and services management strategy compares to that of your peers by using this unique tool. Click on the link below to begin our 10-minute assessment and see how your IT organization measures up!
Custom malware frequently goes undetected. According to Forrester Research, the best way to reduce risk of breach is to deploy file integrity monitoring (FIM) tools that provide immediate alerts. This white paper has been brought to you by NetIQ, the leader in solving complex IT challenges.
This white paper describes the business challenges and opportunities that are driving interest in Identity Governance while discussing considerations your organization should make to help achieve project success.
This paper explores the concept of content-aware IAM, describes the integrated architecture for this new approach, and highlights the benefits that this approach provides.
One of the key strategies that IT teams are pursuing to reduce capital costs while boosting asset utilization and employee productivity is the transition to highly virtualized data centers. However, IDC finds that expectations for further boosts in IT asset use and operational efficiency often surpass the actual results for a variety of reasons. These problems can quickly overwhelm any hoped-for benefits as the scope of virtual server deployment expands.
End User Experience, 30-Min Webinar
Wed. Feb. 22nd ~ 11 AM ET

Are you ready to gain the proactive ability to rapidly respond to end user problems (before they call the help desk)? Then you won't want to miss a webinar that will show you the latest innovation in end user monitoring.
Download this webcast to learn about the design considerations for virtualizing SQL workloads, performance and scalability information and high-availability options, as well as support considerations
Many enterprises have discovered that the use of virtualization to support desktop workloads creates a range of significant benefits. These benefits include price efficiencies, improved IT management and greater agility and choice for end users.

This VMware sponsored webcast with IDC will provide both quantitative measurement of the business value -- defined as the expected ROI -- and qualitative analysis associated with the use of VMware View™. IDC will also provide an analysis of the View Composer and ThinApp™ features of VMware View, including the business value of these solutions and an overview of how they work.

Attend this webcast to learn about:
- Challenges and barriers that might impede the adoption of desktop virtualization
- Navigating roadblocks to facilitate a strategic implementation
- Optimizing qualitative and quantitative benefits to IT and your business
Applications are changing - they're increasingly web-oriented, global in nature and run from multiple device types. Additionally, the volume of data is growing exponentially every year. How do you ensure your applications have fast, accurate, up-to-date information in this new world? Modern applications are data-intensive; delivering data the old way using monolithic databases isn't working. What's needed is a modern approach to data. One that scales-out as needed and delivers predictable high performance, but without sacrificing data consistency or integrity.
VMware View™ 5 simplifies IT management while increasing end user freedom by delivering desktop services from your cloud. Building upon VMware's leadership in desktop virtualization, VMware View 5 delivers a high-performance user experience while giving IT greater policy control.

View this webcast and find out how VMware View 5 can help you:
- Deliver the highest fidelity experience of desktop services across any device and any network
- Simplify and automate IT management, security and control of desktop services
- Reduce the costs associated with your desktop environment
IT professionals are being asked to deliver faster "time-to-value" than ever before. An IDG Research survey found that CIOs are eager to invest in technologies that will enable them to get new applications and services up quickly, achieving faster time-to-value.
Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter
  1. View all Newsletters | Privacy Policy
Resource Center