We recently completed a series of focus groups with members of "Generation Y" or, more specifically, those that are finishing college and about to enter the workforce.  This segment has various definitions but those born between 1978 & 2000 generally fall into it – roughly 76 million folks.  This is a follow-up on one of the themes covered in our most recent MarketInsight on information security trends – younger workers will bring to the workforce a whole new dimension of productivity tools and associated security challenges. 

This will be a three part series covering what we discovered during the course of our research.

One of my open-ended questions for this group was "what is it that the older generation doesn’t understand about your generation and electronic communications?"

The answer was "speed." 

It’s not so much about multi-tasking as that certainly plays into it but more about the speed of communication and response.  Text messaging is preferred because it is fast, short, personal, and to the point.  It can be held in your hand and carried around with you (mobile phone) with no need to find a hotspot, wi-fi, or network connection.  Text provides a real-time interactivity unique to this set of future workers that is something current workers (i.e, older) don’t fully understand as they utilize email for these exchanges.

Even VC Fred Wilson did a recent post on this – "Texting beats Emailing."  Fred’s not a member of Generation Y but invests in them and hits an additional great point here about the absence of noise (i.e., spam) on this channel.  Here’s somewhat of a counterpoint to Fred from Mike Feinstein citing convergence of the two over time.