When Gen Y Joins the Workforce

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The Millennials. Boomlets. The Tech/Net/Digital Generation. Echo Boomers. Generation Y. Call them what you will, but this group of nearly 70 million Americans (generally accepted as aged 18 to 27) are projected to reshape the world. Having the unique experience of being raised during periods of great downsizing/rightsizing, and witnessing parents being laid off, this generation—that has never experienced life without computers—is impacting enterprises and small-to mid-sized businesses alike. “Generation Yers don’t expect to stay in a job, or even a career, for too long—they’ve seen the scandals that imploded Enron and Arthur Andersen, and they’re skeptical when it comes to such concepts as employee loyalty,” observes Bruce Tulgan a researcher, speaker and expert on generational differences in the workforce. “They don’t like to stay too long on any one assignment. This is a generation of multi-taskers, and they can juggle email on their BlackBerrys, while talking on cell phones while trolling online.” Tulgan, who co-authored Managing Generation Y with Carolyn Martin and leads training sessions at companies on how to prepare for and retain Generation Yers, calls Gen Y “the most education-minded generation in history.”

After analyzing Gen Y consumer behavior, Bruce D. Temkin of Forrester Research, Inc. observed that for many Gen Yers, “cell phones are for much more than just talking. These young consumers are considerably more likely than older consumers to use just about any wireless service. Even when compared with Gen Xers, Gen Yers are more likely to send or receive text or picture messages; download ring tones, games, and music ﬁles; and use instant messaging on their cell phones.” Temkin collaborated on a series entitled Designing For Gen Y that offered approaches to Gen Y consumers based on Forrester analyzed survey responses from nearly 50,000 consumers with the goal to understand the differences between Gen Y and older generations of consumers. Temkin writes, “The analysis showed that Gen Yers are more apt to like style, fun, and technology; seek out what’s hot; make purchases based on image; consume all types of digital media; and use every wireless service on their mobile phones. Each of these elements creates a different set of design requirements, such as injecting fun and social networking into the experience and developing experiences that bridge the PC and the phone. Given the unique needs of Gen Y, companies may need to design experiences just for them.” In addition, Temkin notes: “Forrester analyzed consumer survey responses to understand the differences between Younger Generation Y (18- to 22-year-olds) and Older Generation Y (23- to 27-year-olds) consumers. The analysis showed that Younger Gen Yers are more motivated by fun and style and are more connected to technology than older consumers. They also prefer portable devices, use their PCs as media centers, and are social computing aficionados.”

Campus Computing Project

As Gen Yers exit campuses and enter into the workforce, it is useful to examine not only consumer habits that may tag along with them into the enterprise, but also the messaging habits from campus life. Begun in 1990, The Campus Computing Project (CCP) is the largest continuing study of the role of information technology in American higher education. The 2008 Campus Computing Survey—based on data provided by senior campus IT officials, typically the CIO, CTO, or other ranking campus IT officer, representing 531 two-and four-year public and private colleges and universities across the United States—is useful to analyze what messaging environments and practices most students are accustomed.

Fully two-fifths (42.4 percent) of institutions participating in this year’s survey say that they have migrated or are about to migrate to an outsourced student email service; three in ten (28.3 percent) are reviewing institutional options for outsourcing student email during the current academic year. In contrast, just 14.8 percent of institutions have migrated to outsourced email services for faculty. The majority of campuses outsourcing student email have opted for Google (56.5 percent), while two-fifths (38.4 percent) are using Microsoft and 4.8 percent are using Zimbra. Across all sectors the percentage of college classrooms that have access to wireless networks continues to rise. Overall, about two-thirds (67.6 percent) of classrooms have access to wireless, up from 60.1 percent in 2007 and 31.0 percent in 2004). Classroom wireless access is highest in private universities (76.0 percent, up from 68.9 percent in 2007) and lowest in community colleges (56.1 percent, up from 44.1 percent in 2007).

A highlighted area of concern on campus is the cost of peer-to-peer (P2P) compliance. According to Kenneth C. Green, founding director of CCP, the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act (HEA) signed by President Bush in August as the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 imposes “hundreds of new reporting requirements that govern the activities of the nation’s 4,400 public, private, and for-profit two-and four-year colleges and universities.” Green says that buried deep in the 1,158 pages of the HEA legislation, in Section 488, are three new regulations intended to force colleges and universities to address the issue of illegal P2P file sharing of digital content—primarily music and movies.

The key P2P provisions, says Green, require campuses: “to make an annual disclosure that informs students that the illegal distribution of copyrighted materials may subject them to criminal and civic penalties, and to certify to the Secretary of Education that (the institution) has developed plans to ‘effectively combat’ the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material.” Green notes that while the plan is to be developed, no mandate is in effect to collect the plans or have them approved. “The language explicitly notes that institutions are not required to adopt any particular type of technology-based deterrent, recognizing that even institutions that ‘prohibit content monitoring’ retain the authority to determine their own plans.” Green points out that “unlike the employees of large technology firms who have broadband access at work but whose employers can monitor their online activities, colleges and universities generally impose far fewer restrictions of the personal use of Internet resources than corporations and government agencies.”

On the heels of the recent legislation that will force campuses to respond with potentially costly compliance plans, comes information that Gen Y’s use of P2P to illegally access data appears to have been exaggerated. A year ago the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) said in a statement that its 2005 much quoted and frequently cited commissioned study had “incorrectly concluded that 44 percent of the motion picture industry’s domestic losses were attributable to piracy by college students.” In addition, the association projected that its “…2007 study will report that number to be approximately 15 percent.” According to Green, the MPAA attributed the bad data in 2005 to an isolated error. Green contends that it is now and always has been consumers at large, not students that are the primary source of P2P piracy.

From Personal Habits to Business Habits

While there has been much generalizing of Gen Y traits and risky online behavior, the truth is Gen Y is not the only group embracing the latest technology, especially when it comes to messaging in the workplace. Gen X and Boomers are also responsible for the infiltration of potentially unsanctioned technology. In September, data was collected in a survey of more than 500 employees and IT managers to determine the impact of PC applications, Web sites and social networking services. These included real-time consumer applications (e.g., instant messaging, P2P, VoIP) that “are often introduced by individual end-users and use highly evasive techniques to traverse the network. In addition they include a wide variety of Web 2.0 applications used by end-users at work, ranging from file sharing to collaborative work apps—but also social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn.” According to FaceTime, who commissioned NewDiligence to conduct the survey, these applications are the source of both real and potential risk to corporations because they provide vectors for malware, intellectual property loss, compliance risk and decreased employee productivity.

The NewDiligence survey found Internet application usage has expanded dramatically with Web conferencing, streaming audio and Web-based email to be the top applications in use. The study shows:

Web conferencing is now used by 82 percent of employees, up from 72 percent last year.
In addition to penetrating across all organizations, according to IT managers, in two-thirds of organizations, eight or more of these applications are in use. That represents 300 percent growth since 2005, the first year of the tracking study.
On average, an organization has 9.3 of these types of Internet applications in use by its employees.

The study also found that streaming media and file sharing is higher at smaller companies, and that collaborative work application usage increases by company size with larger companies most likely to use them.

Another recent review of P2P, this one by MultiMedia Intelligence, predicts that P2P Internet traffic, despite having grown at a torrid pace for years, will grow almost 400 percent over the next five years. Growing from a level of 1.6 petabytes of Internet traffic per month in 2007, P2P Internet traffic will grow to almost 8 petabytes per month by 2012. “Despite the prevailing perceptions of P2P as synonymous with content piracy, P2P is emerging as viable means of distributing legitimate content,” observes Frank Dickson, chief research officer with MultiMedia Intelligence.

Gartner, Inc., recently released research that anticipated the popularity of video among consumers to fuel a similar interest in video within enterprises. Says the report, “The proliferation of video within the enterprise will require numerous modifications in content authoring training and procedures, information management strategy and improvements in analytic technologies. Information managers, architects, record managers and content creators will all need to adjust their strategic plans accordingly.”

“Consumerization has proven a force of unmatched potency in the past and the same will be true when it comes to the explosive spike in the popularity of consumer online video, fueling a similar interest in video within enterprises,” says Whit Andrews, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “Video use on the Web is growing swiftly, with 73 percent of the Internet audience watching a video online at least monthly, that is about 90 million viewers.”

According to a Gartner survey of 800 end-user organizations in July, software for the management of images and video is the fastest-growing segment of the content management market, with just 44 percent of enterprises having such products today, but 22 percent intending to install it in 2009.

“The wave of content management products aimed at satisfying simple content management problems through consumer-attractive capabilities like blogs and wikis will surge through digital asset management (DAM),” predicts Andrews. “Users who film their children and pets at home and upload the results to the Internet in minutes will not accept onerous restrictions of inflexible security, access controls or forced metadata schemes in the workplace.”

Gartner believes that the popularity of simple DAM will force a number of different technological problems to be solved, such as the ability to incorporate video simply into other document types. Such uses are likely to be so compelling and the demand for them so great that by 2013, more than 25 percent of the content, which workers see in a day, will be dominated by pictures, video or audio.

Gen Y and IT Challenges

Since Gen Yers have perpetually been immersed in a digital and Internet driven world, it is easy to assume this generation will propel the adoption of favorite messaging preferences into the workplace. This will only fuel the trend that is already being noted in companies today. “We work with large and mid-size enterprises every day, seeing first-hand that Internet applications are brought into the workplace by employees for both work and personal reasons,” says Frank Cabri, vice president of marketing and product management at FaceTime. “IT managers are often at odds with employees’ belief that they have the right to use whatever applications they feel they need to do their jobs, including these Internet applications that are evasive and easily circumvent existing security infrastructure. They create potential compliance, information leakage concerns as well as introducing myriad vectors for incoming malware.”

According to NewDiligence, “while email and Web browsing are typically monitored and controlled by IT (79 percent and 65 percent respectively), the extent of the risk associated with Internet applications may be less understood. Fewer than 40 percent of IT respondents report monitoring and managing applications such as P2P and only 25 percent say they are securing and monitoring Web 2.0 applications.” For the first time the survey this year asked about incidents involving intellectual property and regulatory compliance. The findings: “The problems appear widespread—Four in ten IT managers report incidents involving non-compliance (37 percent), while another 27 percent have seen unintentional release of corporate information. On average, IT managers report 34 such incidents per month. Not surprisingly, the larger the organization, the greater the incident rate. Organizations with 5,000 or more employees have 68 occurrences in a typical month, compared with ten incidents at businesses with fewer than 100 employees.”

On one hand, corporate IT is asked to embrace new technologies to help maintain competitiveness and foster ease of business. On the other, IT is responsible for securing and controlling new applications and technology. This is proving to be a complex and difficult line to walk particularly as users, especially Gen Yers, are savvier than ever at getting around IT.

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