Youth matters more than ever in IT, especially as the Web becomes more interactive and heads in directions where baby boomer IT managers may be ill-equipped to lead, Gartner Inc. analysts said at the firm’s Symposium/ITxpo conference here last week.
Teenagers and young adults are racing ahead of their elders in adopting new technologies and processes for collaborating, such as wikis and video sharing. And Gartner analysts said repeatedly that companies poised for future growth need to be clued in to the so-called consumerization of IT — a point driven home by Google Inc.’s agreement to acquire online video-sharing company YouTube Inc. for stock valued at $1.65 billion.
Two days after the Google-YouTube deal was announced, John Chambers, Cisco Systems Inc.’s president and CEO, said at the Gartner conference that he expects high-definition videoconferencing and unified data, voice and video communications for mobile devices to become key tools for enhancing productivity, improving contacts with customers and cutting costs.
Dennis Giokas, chief technology officer at Canada Health Infoway Inc. in Montreal, said he agrees that more-collaborative tools are needed. But he doesn’t see their introduction as necessarily being dependent on cultural changes that young people may lead. For Giokas, the new approaches being touted now raise the age-old problem of change management.
“There will always be, in my opinion, resistance to change — especially if people don’t see a business benefit,” he said.
Read more at: Computerworld