So reports Yahoo! News in a report from the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Office computing technology is trailing home technology.
Younger employees — like that new batch of college grads hitting the market right now — are going to be pushing employers to use Web 2.0 technologies on the job. And if their companies don’t start adopting them, younger workers will most likely just start using them on the sly.
“The upcoming generation is going to have a major impact on business. She will expect to have access to her tools in the workplace,” said Marthin De Beer, a senior VP with Cisco Systems. “It would be like someone from my generation not having access to e-mail and instant messaging. If they don’t get this stuff, they probably won’t be there for a long time.”
IDC reports more use of web 2.0 technologies in corporations than I would have expected, although this might be in one department in a massive, global enterprise. IDC research shows “that 45% of companies have workers blogging, 43% use RSS feeds, and 35% of companies have employees using wikis.” IDC also reported that company executives and CIOs are often unaware of employee use of tools on the other side of the firewall.
I am currently researching what is holding companies back from web-enabled informal learning, and this push from the newcomers adds fuel to the fire.
RSS Feed
Follow Jay on Twitter
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
A couple of months ago I heard Mitch Benson speak at a conference in Northern Ireland (he is Microsoft’s Worldwide Industry Manager for Education Solutions). Benson described people at job interviews at Microsoft asking “which IRC client do you use here?” and declining to accept employment if they could not use the client of their choice – which might well not be MSN. Secondly he indicated that smart employers realise that when they are hiring they are hiring the worker’s informal network, not just the worker; and that the quality of the worker’s network is becoming a key consideration in the hiring decision.
Seb
I’m glad to see that there’s some impetus to get these technologies into the work environment. I wonder if companies’ reluctance to adopt stems from their inability to grasp the ‘intangibles’ you speak of in your later post.