The Conundrum of Business User 2.0

This might be a horrible case of parental pride, but I think my 6-year old son is a great example of the new ‘Gen 2.0’ business user. He surfs the kid-friendly Internet, he regularly finds and beats online games without any help from his daddy, and most importantly he cannot seem to understand why he can’t watch ‘Scooby Doo Meets Batman’ in any room in the house at any time he wants. In other words, he’s tech-savvy, he’s adept at picking up new apps, and he lives in a world where everything is available on-demand. I’d say he’s the future of every enterprise.

These are the folks that were born during the days of the first Macs, children during the rise of cable, teenagers during the boom years of the Internet, and pushed through college in the days of XM radio. So it’s not unreasonable to say that you already have huge ranks of new hires just like my son, with just about every one of your 24-year old management trainees fitting this faster-adopter, tech-savvy, on-demand personality profile. And they will reasonably expect that every piece of financial services data they hear about on the news would be available for mashing in a spreadsheet within minutes. The same goes for your newest customer services reps. Sales executives. Logistics managers. All the same. All expect their metaphorical Scooby Doo data to be on their desktop instantly, without excuses.

Easy enough to imagine but it can be a heavy burden for enterprises that spend 80%+ of their IT budget on maintenance of 10-, 20- and even 30-year old applications. Hardly apps that could be described as ‘agile’. And, as I heard one tech journalist put it recently, your typical 50+ year-old CXO doesn’t have a lot of empathy for this type of real-time, tech-heavy employee (afterall, that CXO didn’t spend his entire childhood on a computer like his newest wave of employees did).

But that CXO should care. Because their Business User 2.0 employees are likely to be the most innovative and innovation is generally thought to be where the bulk of corporate growth comes from. Put a big sign above their heads that says ‘Growth Happens Here’. And these new users have other appreciable qualities. They are technically inclined, more than any prior generation of users by an order of magnitude. Want them to learn a new application? No problem, they do that every month on their 360/PSP/Wii/iPhone. Worried about them writing a macro? Collaborating with others on a wiki? Mashing their own data into their personal portlets? Commenting on a blog? No need to worry.

But therein lies the conundrum: Business User 2.0, unlike previous waves of employees, will do it themselves if they can’t get what they need from the corporate infrastructure. That’s good for them and maybe good for the organization overall…but bad for IT (they get marginalized), bad for corporate governance (hard to govern what you do not provide), and bad for the CXO (who can’t manage what he doesn’t provide or support). Business User 2.0 places entirely new, and perhaps greater, demands (just like my son!) from a technology and management point of view. Luckily, they can also give you a much more flexible and adaptable workforce.

And if you're looking for a bright, agile, hard-working Scooby-Doo fan for your management trainee program, I'll have a great candidate for you in about 16 years.