When Demographics & Technology Collide-The New Knowledge Worker & Your Organization

A new workforce is emerging. What is referred to as the Net Generation — that born between 1977 and 1994 — is entering the workforce with their first “real jobs”. And they’re bringing with them significantly different attitudes about technology and unconventional expectations about the workplace. At the same time, today’s workforce is increasingly going mobile. Both of these factors will have a profound impact on many aspects of your organization, including your IT environment. This piece examines the implications of these factors and demonstrates how online communities and social software meets the needs of this emerging workforce, what we are calling the new knowledge worker, in the digital economy.

Demographics: The Net Generation Comes to the Workforce
Thirty years ago, the Boomers represented the largest group ever to move into the workforce. By their numbers alone, they influenced many facets of society, including the workplace. The Net Generation carries more clout than the Boomers. For starters, they're bigger; stats show that four million of them will enter the market annually in North America in this year alone. This means that by 2010, they'll make up 40 percent of the workforce (Don Tapscott, The Rise of the Net Generation).

According to Tapscott, the Net Gener's influence is already prevalent. This generation has grown up with Napster, Blogs and Facebook. They are very well connected to large networks of their peers and can tap into this network in an instant using social networking or messaging applications.

As employees, the 80 million young adults that belong to the Net Generation have a more rich experience in the digital world and more personal connections in the workplace. Unlike the Boomers, they want to engage and collaborate with their colleagues rather than work under rigid command and controls.

Relationships and collaboration are a part of the Net Generation's approach to work. They prefer to work on teams, so that problem solving and decision-making is bottom up, not top down. Net Geners will want to use technology in the workplace that reflects this-one that creates and supports a network based on participation where users are the driving force, not necessarily management.

Technology: Going Mobile
Technology also has its role to play in affecting the way that people work. When we consider the following statistics, it's clear that the digital economy has prompted a paradigm shift in the way people work.

According to a recent study by IDC, the global mobile workforce is expected to grow by more than 20 percent in the next four years, with 878 million mobile workers toiling away on laptops, handhelds and cell phones by 2009.

There are currently 3.3 billion mobile devices versus 900 million PCs (FastCompany.com).

According to IDC, there are 525 million mobile social network users today, and that number is expected to jump to almost a one billion by the year 2012.

People are going mobile-with better connectivity, unlimited accessibility and more powerful devices than ever before.  This is quickly creating a new mobile workforce. People are spending less and less time in the office and more time working at home or on the road. Being distributed has never been so easy. And addictive.

When we combine technology with demographics, we can see that connecting across cultures, languages, time zones, and teams is becoming the standard for the new knowledge worker.

So What Can You Do?
A social software strategy for the IT Executive is pretty straightforward when it comes to this new workforce. First and foremost, management needs to acknowledge the workforce and embrace its new habits and characteristics.

As they flood the workforce and overtake the Boomers in numbers, the Net Generation workforce will expect your organization to support the way they work.  These new knowledge workers are accelerating the move to mobile social networking, including cell phone-based blogging, multimedia sharing, location-based socialization services, chat-these are their primary work tools.

Your corporate applications will have to support the way both generations work: Boomers make phone calls and send emails; and Net Generation knowledge workers communicate using text messaging and online networks. Regardless of the generational mix of your knowledge workforce, the requirement will be the same: creating better connections to the expertise, knowledge and resources they need to get their jobs done effectively and efficiently.

Social Software Solutions
IT Executives need to be considering social software solutions that are mobile ready, not just simply mobile enabled-solutions that go beyond just connecting your mobile workforce using the web browser in your mobile device.

Simply put, organizations should look for social software solutions that have been built with the mobile user in mind. Solutions that support features like:

• Dedicated application control
• Strong email integration and notification options
• Dedicated collaboration tools for remote blogging and messaging
• Background processing functions for improved data sending and receiving
• Powerful search and discovery features so they can quickly connect to the people and information they need while not in the office

Regardless of how distributed your workforce is, the requirement is still same:  organizations need to keep their workforce productive. Management is tasked with creating more powerful and efficient connections to the information, expertise and resources their knowledge workers need to get their jobs done more efficiently. And it shouldn't matter if your employees are in the office, on the road or working at home.

That's why we created IGLOO; to help companies leverage online community and social software solutions across the entire enterprise-inside and out. Organizations are just now starting to realize the potential business benefits of online communities and social software to improve productivity across their mobile workforce.

IGLOO's richly featured Web 2.0 community platform is mobile ready-making it available to your workforce via any leading mobile device, including BlackBerry® smartphones. With our mobile client, you can increase collaboration between an increasingly mobile workforce and improve productivity by making your people more accessible and efficient-using the social networking features they're familiar with, including blogs, messaging, peer-to-peer contacts, personal profiles, mash-ups, member directories, status displays, RSS feeds, notifications and more.  

Online communities deliver great solutions for companies looking for new and innovative ways to find information, share knowledge, experience and ideas, and to build business relationships across organizational and geographical boundaries. When implemented correctly, online communities can create tremendous corporate capacity by connecting, empowering and motivating their most valuable business asset:  people.

Online Community Deployment Practices
The introduction of online community and social software solutions requires the effective management of people, process, and technology during the implementation and deployment to ensure success.

It goes without saying these tools must adhere to corporate governance policies and practices set up by the organization and made available in a formalized, controlled and secure environment. Managers need to become enablers in this new world and not gatekeepers. It requires changes in existing business models and corporate culture.

The following recommendations can help your organization as you embark on online communities with social software features for your business:

Technology

• Integrated Suite - identify and recognize the advantages a complete suite versus a single point solution such as a wiki or blog can deliver not only over the short but also the longer term as your business strategy matures.
• Securities - ensure that your corporate data is secure including storage, transmission, and accessibility and auditing.
• Extensibility- look for solutions that will integrate seamlessly with your desktop applications, enterprise solutions and mobile devices.
• Administrations - identify your business requirements around controls for configuration, measurement and monitoring of information and collaboration.

Deployment

• Pilot - identify a known business problem with a high probability for success to show quick time-to-value and learn for your experiences.
• Bottom Up - empower your employees and make them part of the decision making process - as your employees will ultimately be the key contributors to your community and business social networks.
• Measurement - identify key measures of success including risks right from the start.
• Outreach - create and implement outreach and awareness campaigns to stimulate usage and excitement.

Culture

• Generational Gap - identify, recognize and plan for the differences between how different generations utilize and consume information within your workforce.
• Change Management - changing behavior is difficult; plan on finding champions to promote the network; implement incentive programs; code of conduct and best practices.
• Feedback Loops - create easy to use feedback tools in your network such as polls, blogs and rating that can provide critical insight into future investments and deployments.

In Conclusion
At the intersection between demographics and technology, you'll find online communities and social software solutions. These technologies define a better way to do business by internally connecting the workforce and externally, connecting an organization with its customers, partners and suppliers. The end product is a more agile, productive and competitive organization. And happier new knowledge workers.

Community Solutions in Action-The BlackBerry Partners Fund
Backed by RIM, Royal Bank of Canada, JLA Ventures and Thompson Reuters, the BlackBerry Partners Fund^TM is a $150 million venture capital fund focused on investing in companies creating new applications for the BlackBerry®.

The organization needed to quickly create an online community and corporate social network to coordinate and manage all of the internal and external facing activities of the BlackBerry Fund, including the promotion of the fund to potential applicants; the management, coordination and execution of all incoming business plans and portfolios, coordination of their Intern Program and the creation and launch of an Expert Blogger Program to provide industry insights.

It took IGLOO one month to deploy an online community for the Fund, from conception, through to creation and launch. The community was launched in August 2008 and the BlackBerry Fund immediately began accepting applications. In the first two months, they had over 3,000 submissions-all accessed and reviewed from BlackBerry devices. Obviously, the solution wouldn't work if the application wasn't mobile ready.

IGLOO provided a complete SaaS-based, turnkey solution-meaning that the Fund required no additional hardware, software or IT infrastructure to be up and running at minimal cost and low upfront investment.

Find Out More-Take the Community Challenge
Where's the business value in online communities and social networking? Take our challenge to find out. Visit: http://www.igloosoftware.com/solutions/challenge.

Or Attend an Upcoming Webinar: Make Business Connections that Matter. Contact us for more information: 1-877-664-4566 or sales@igloosoftware.com.