Reader Comment Makes Me Ask: Are Corporations Responsible for the Tech Gen Gap?

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In the meantime, I have been thinking a lot about a comment Greg made when considering the technology-generation gap. Here’s what he wrote:

I am finding that this "gap" as you call it is not necessarily specific to age. To me, the issue is that many corporations are still very 1.0 in their approach. As "older people" start to discover how 2.0 works in the work place, you will start to see a higher adoption rate on the web.

I think his comment has some merit. How many Web 2.0 features are we exposed to at our companies? On Friday, just three days ago, I learned folks from Alcatel-Lucent had formed a group on Yammer and were having a great time discussing products. Yammer works like Twitter (without the 140 character limitation) and you have to have an Alcatel-Lucent email address to participate in the private group.

You have to know what you are doing when you join because monitoring the chatter on the web isn’t very fun. But adding the Adobe Air application that allows the Yammering to sit on your desktop and refresh helps you be “part of the team” which can be very valuable when you are talking about a multi-national, complex organization like Alcatel-Lucent! To Greg’s point, age doesn’t seem to be a factor in participation. Instead it’s awareness and technical savvy.

Another example is this blog! While a number of people in the company are interested in the Worldwide Teen Lab, they are confused by how to subscribe and make the blog part of their daily news consumption. “What is an RSS Feed, how do I get one, what do I do with it once I have it?” is what they ask. While companies struggle with firewalls and privacy concerns, they end up shutting out the outside world – often removing the organic benefits of the worldwide web!

Imagine the power of a personal work portal that would allow employees to blend all the information they need from their company (inside the firewall), with the intelligence they need from the market (outside the firewall), sprinkle in a bit of personal information (both) and have it all work together in a seamless, Web 2.0 environment allowing them to participate in IM (both inside and outside the company), file sharing and more.

So Greg, thank you so much for your comment. And we still need to consider age when it comes to our future. We may be losing a competitive advantage while we take a fear-based approach to access. We will need to look for ways to become Work 2.0 to accommodate and even exploit the Web 2.0 skills today’s youth are bringing to our workplace.

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