Some IT leaders are bridging the generation gap in their companies by revamping older applications with snazzier user interfaces and by creating new communications platforms that include the best of all the ages.
Some IT leaders are bridging the generation gap in their companies by revamping older applications with snazzier user interfaces and by creating new communications platforms that include the best of all the ages.
Baby boomers and later generations of employees prefer different means of communication, the thinking goes. The Boomers go for e-mail while the younger folks are much more comfortable with instant messaging and social networking . To foster broad collaboration throughout the company, IT managers say the idea is to give employees whatever means they will actually use — and seek out — to get their jobs done.
Slideshow: Where IT pros do their social networking
“It’s our job to manage the customer experience — Gen X, Baby Boomer, whatever,” said Yuri Aguiar, chief technology officer at Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, at at Computerworld ‘s Premier 100 conference , held in Orlando this week.
By 2012, those born between 1977 and 1994 — what some call the “Echo Generation” — will make up one-third of the U.S. population, he said. “Are we ready for them? They’re the technology generation — they’re very happy to put personal information out there, on social networks and the like. It’s very good for collaboration but not so good from a security perspective,” he added
One thing the New York-based advertising agency is doing to get ready for these workers is revamping some of its older applications to better appeal to, and be more readily usable by, the younger generations of workers. For example, Ogilvy took a 10-year-old application, which was “really klunky but had solid data beneath it,” and created an alternative user interface, Aguiar said. Users can choose which UI to use, he added.
“This created some overhead on IT — we had to support both — but it was easier to support two UIs than it would have been to support two applications,” Aguiar said.
Likewise, Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp., the railroad giant based in Fort Worth, Texas, recently revamped a 20-year-old, mainframe-based train-scheduling system that was originally written in the Natural fourth generation programming language. “A new generation of people was coming in and asking, hey, where’s the mouse and what’s up with the green screen?” said CIO Jo-ann Olsovsky.
Because the train scheduling application is so critical to the railroad’s operations, it was easier to create a new graphical front end than it would have been to rewrite the entire thing. The new Excel front end has simplified the learning curve for new hires, Olsolvsky said. The plan is to create newer front-ends to other major legacy applications, she added.
Deloitte Services LP , a New York-based accounting firm, is taking multi-generational support even further by creating an all-encompassing communications platform offering users just about every possible means of collaboration. “IT organizations have a challenge to be as inclusive as possible,” said CIO Jerome Oglesby.
Some 40% of Deloitte’s 165,000 employees are part of Generation Y, and the average age of a Deloitte employee is 28. “We made a promise to support the way they work, and provide anywhere, anytime, access for provide global collaboration,” Oglesby said. It’s particularly important for employees to feel connected to their co-workers when they’re on a client engagement that can last several months or even longer.
In response, the company created DeloitteNet 2.0, which includes instant messaging, Web conferencing, a Facebook-like social network, real-time collaboration, whiteboard, workspaces and more — in addition to voicemail and email. But now everyone gets voicemail on their mobile phones, too. The idea is to let the end-user drive his or her own experience instead of force-fitting something that may not feel comfortable.
“Without these technologies, you run the risk of depleting the workforce and losing the war on talent,” Oglesby said. “You have to do it, or they’ll do it without you. If you don’t give them the tools they want and need, you’ll have all these skunkworks going on around you.”
BNSF, the railroad, is rolling out a similar all-encompassing communications system that includes desktop video, email and voicemail. In this case, however, it’s more about trying to connect the railway’s far-flung employees, who are just as likely to be on a train or fixing a microwave tower out in the field as they are to be in the office.
It was time to replace the aging PBX-based voicemail system anyway. “It died a few months ago and I had to go on eBay to get the parts,” Olsovsky said, “and no, I’m sorry to say that’s not a joke.”
