Another Generation Y (Generation Next) in the workforce has been written.  This time the article is at Infoworld and titled, The Generation Gap Challenges IT Managers.

The gap is widening, with more workers stacked at both ends of the age spectrum. There are approximately 80 million Baby Boomers, those born roughly between the years of 1946 and 1964, and 70 million in Generation Y, born 1978 through the present, but only 60 million in the middle in Generation X, those born 1965 to 1977.

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That creates a cultural divide, as workers of different ages will generally hold different views of technology use and adoption.

To be honest, I still like my old paper on the subject, The New Workforce.

I make it a habit not to post community squabbles that often take place in any IT project (whether open source or not).  When people have the best intentions and respect the opinions of others, I don't believe it is right for me or anyone else to publicly exploit discussions that are meant to remain within the community.  However, the conflicts going on at XOOPS.org have been made so public that it's hard for me to put a lot of faith in a project that treats its own people so poorly.

"What's disturbing about these numbers isn't just that one group is more or less represented than another in IT, but how the IT workforce got to these numbers. Over the past 6-1/2 years, while the IT ranks swelled by 1 million to 3.6 million, the number of women in IT fell by nearly 8 percent and the number of African-Americans in IT plunged by more than 25 percent."

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"Also remarkable is the fact that a high CI [collaboration index] score clearly translates into business performance. Overall, the research found, 36% of a company’s performance was due to its Collaboration Index, compared to 16% for the company’s strategic orientation, and 7% for market turbulence."

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The biggest reward I get from working on IT projects is the opportunity to take new ideas and new strategies and piece them together into something that has never been done before.  Even when I'm not the one originating the new idea, I like helping other innovative people bring their ideas to the table.  I have ideas, dreams, and aspirations to help take my workplace to the next level of where it should be via innovative use of what I know best, information technology.  How could innovation and all these wonderful ideas I have in my head not be anything but a good thing for my organization?  A recent article in the Wall Street Journal answers just that question by saying that there are negatives for an organization that innovates too much.

In "How Innovation Can Be Too Much of a Good Thing", George Anders writes about how companies and business consultants are rediscovering that less innovation can produce better business results.  Companies that used to push the limit in efficiency are finding that they're "jamming too many new ideas into a product pipeline, without enough slack time to ensure that critical tasks stayed on schedule".

Similar insights have been standard wisdom on the manufacturing floor for decades. Factory managers learn about bottlenecks through the formal discipline of queuing theory. That teaches them to keep a little slack in the system to handle the unpredictable -- but inevitable -- crunch times.

"I was a freelance web developer once (both full- and part-time.) I remember my 1-person thing being exceptionally uncomplicated. Project work was easy to find, and money wasn’t my key motivator. I did it because I enjoyed it.

Eight years later (today,) I co-own a 10-person thing called Electric Pulp. As much as I prefer the new thing to the old, it’s far less uncomplicated (that was a double negative for anyone keeping count.)

A recent conversation has me thinking just how different the two efforts really are. EP is far more ambitious than anything I ever did as a freelancer. But while the business aspects of what we do seem to scale really well, there are other aspects that have gotten a little crazy.

How so, you ask? Let’s count…"

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"A while back I wrote a post speculating about the collaboration technologies today’s college students will expect to use when they enter the workforce. I guessed that today’s collegians will want to continue their use of social networking tools on the job—that they won’t consider these tools to be only suitable for ‘play time,’ but rather as important (integral?) parts of their day. More recently, I wrote a couple posts about Facebook, the social networking site that’s become wildly popular on many college campuses and is now penetrating the rest of society. "

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"After all, why is collaboration any more important now than it’s ever been? One argument is that now more than ever, businesses are all about their people. (Yeah, OK, that’s an inelegant twist on Microsoft’s “People-Ready Business” slogan.) But that’s not true—successful businesses have always leveraged the skills of their employees, and the so-called knowledge economy has been around seemingly forever, or at least several decades. So what’s new here?"

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James Robertson on the FASTForward Blog has challenged everyone to list at least five tips for gaining adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technologies.

So in the spirit of “walking the walk”, I hereby challenge everyone posting on this blog to publish their list of 5 tips for gaining adoption of enterprise 2.0, both at the organisational and individual level.

You can click here to see his list of five tips.  I found the link to this article on Larry Cannell's own blog at Collaboration Loop.  In his own post he also offers five more tips for bringing Enterprise 2.0 to an organization.  I'm a little short for time this week, but at a later date I plan to revisit this challenge of 5 tips started by James Robertson.  This is good stuff!

The New Workforce: Generation Next (Generation Y) in your Organization

4. Recommendations

Organizations are beginning to take note that a new generational cohort is entering the workforce. However, even articles and publications that discuss differences in contemporary work cohorts often fail to make a distinction between Generation X and Generation Next (see Kogan, 2001 for example). As the number of Nexters continue to grow and make their presence known, organizations are likely to realize the generational changes taking place. The earlier cited strategy + business article noted that "if consulted these young employees (Nexters) can be an enormous force for positive change and success in their companies. If ignored, they will doubtless spend their brain cycles on the job plotting how to make their own work lives, not their companies better". Those businesses that respond positively to the traits of the new generation will likely succeed. Those who do not positively respond to the Nexters, but instead continue with their pre-Nexter culture may face failure.

Zemke (2000, pp. 146 - 147) offers a number of suggestions with how best to manage Generation Next. Among some of those suggestions are: