One of the great benefits of this medium is the diversity of opinion from those attending conferences in person or virtually. The Always On gig is a good case in point. Run this Technorati search and you’ll see what I mean. For me, it is Jeff Nolan who comes up with the sharpest views and more interesting questions:
I would have liked to see some discussion about how Generation M entering the workforce is going to force changes on the systems that we deploy and how we build them. The convergence of enterprise and consumer software has a much bigger impact on my world than the convergence of media and the internet.
I’ve argued in a number of posts that next generation employees are going to be far more tech savvy than the present lot. I believe it presents challenges and opportunities, some of which are visible, some of which are unknown.
Take for instance Philip Woodgate’s call for a new hire. Potential employees can get a flavour of what it means to join his firm from reading his blog and the firm’s ethos by clicking through to the main site. To me, Philip is showing how a consumery service can meld with the business. That’s a step along the innovator’s path.
One of the ways this will pan out is through things like online payment systems. My 16 year old son is an occasional eBay trader. If he chooses to train in the profession then might he not reasonably expect to see eBay/PayPal mechanisms embedded into purchasing applications?
Thinking about training – would YouTube be an appropriate resource? Zoli Erdos is forever coming up with gems that are both informative and entertaining. If you’re a tech junkie then would you expect RocketBoom to be a must view site? How about Ismael’s thoughts about 8,000 contacts on your iPod? And what if the iPod morph’s into a telephony device? How about embedded podcasts and videos inside wiki-style knowledge systems?
In short, I see the greatest impact in the notion that entertainment and work become more closely aligned through the tools people will expect to use. Dig through the Channel 9 videos – there’s a lot of really useful stuff there. If this kind of convergence takes hold, Gen M will, in effect start work in a semi-trained state. In one sense that’s already happened. so what’s the impact? I can see Gen M selecting potential employers based on the perceived fun factor. How scary is that?
Technorati Tags: employee relationships
