Here’s the third and final post on this topic for now.  This seems to be high on the interest list of the business media as I have had several press calls discussing it in detail recently.  The overriding question from the business press is what are enterprises to do as new devices, new technologies, and new habits enter the workforce.  What security measures must be taken?  I’ll cover my thoughts on that in another post. 

The final overriding point that was made to us during our research was that there is a pretty firm personal boundary line in how this group communicates.  For example, it is acceptable for friends to text message back and forth but was perceived to be awkward (too personal) if a supervisor requested a phone number in order to be able to send text messages.  That more formal communication was thought to be best conducted through email.  Interestingly, peer communication in the workplace via text messaging was viewed as acceptable albeit the exception not the norm.

One thing that really struck me was that this group appears to understand the difference between personal and business related communication preserving personal relationships through informal formats like text and using email for more formal ones. Both text and email are viewed as private (ie, one to one) although there was no expectation of privacy in company supplied email and pretty much consensus that company supplied email was for work-related activities not personal ones. 

The difference I see here is that those of us that entered the workforce "pre-email" have blurred the line between work and personal because we had no real convienient alternative for personal electronic communications.  Even if we had a personal email account, access was relegated to the home as very few companies had open internet access and even there connection speeds were slow.  My first email experience was at Arthur Andersen where we utilized Lotus Notes for internal messaging and collaboration.  It was a huge step to expose this platform beyond the four walls and enable external email communication.

This next wave of workers will have built its personal social relationships either through broadband connected personal email accounts (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.) and/or text messaging versus using the corporate network (and better bandwidth) to blur the line.  Effectively a more clear separation of what is appropriate for work versus what is for personal communication. 

Another interesting point made around site messaging or social networks like Facebook or MySpace (of which this group were limited users) was that they are viewed as more (too) public and not the place for meaningful interchange.  Almost a backlash against the amount of time spent and information disclosed on these types of services – certainly a contrarian point to current hype.  Also out of favor was instant messaging with several logged in but "invisible" using it as an alert service to be informed of the arrival of a new email.  It was viewed as too invasive and reinforces the point I made in Part 2 about connections on their terms.