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.

Here’s the second post of three on this topic.  Being connected is not a new concept to any of us but the emphasis on being connected to be "in the loop" was interesting to hear and how this desire for constant connection is part of daily life.

If you do not have a mobile phone, you are disconnected and out of touch.  And we are not talking about the latest PDA or Blackberry but about a standard keypad flip-type phone.  The former were viewed as more for business people and generally the older set.  This group could get it all done by using T9 predictive texting language. This is consistent with how this group communicates at this point.  They are not sharing presentations and spreadsheets so the notion of having a full function keyboard for communicating is not top of mind.  Browsing the web via a mobile device did not come up either through my lack of direct questioning about it or the absence of this type of use.

There are very few, if any, places the phone doesn’t go and several could even text without looking at the keypad – quite a skill.  On the topic of email, there was consensus that they could not live without it but that it had a very defined, more formal role like communication outside of their closest personal network (professors, supervisors, etc.). 

Although constantly connected, this connection is on their terms versus face-to-face or even voice-to-voice with many opting to text versus talk.

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.