I am the “instant” generation. I’ve got to have it now. No waiting…for anything. I’ve been weened on a system of me first and right now. The idea of writing a letter by hand, putting a stamp on it, and physically mailing it to someone is as foreign to me as popping popcorn on the stove. Email is the next shoe to drop. I would rather have instant messaging, instant Google results, instant book and music downloads, instant, real-time video collaboration, instant entertainment – whenever I want, on whatever device I want. Instant everything. It’s all about instant results. And this is how I want to work. I am the “Millennial” worker. Like it or not, here I come…
Sounds a little like a bad late night movie, doesn’t it? But it is the new reality. Our workforce is transitioning, and it is happening now. According to Accenture‘s research report, Global Research on Millennials’ Use of Technology, “To engage Millennial workers requires finding the right balance between boundaries and freedoms, as opposed to blanket control that will increasingly send them to more flexible competitors. And the balancing point will no doubt move every year, maybe every quarter.” Wow. Is your IT department prepared for this kind of change? Do you have the right foundation, the right infrastructure? And it’s not the Millennial workers’ fault – they are just a reflection of society and culture as a whole.
So, with the myriad of personal mobile devices exploding onto the market, and the Millennials’ growing sense of individual freedom and empowerment, how can a centralized IT department keep up? Do you mandate the technologies that all workers use, and limit the flexibility and ingenuity that freedom offers, or do you allow your people to make their own independent decisions on what technologies work best for them and their personalities and habits – within a loose framework of controls?
The answer is that we must develop and cultivate a philosophy of agility. The ability to adapt our enterprise within the framework of our core values and mission – our organizational ‘constitution.’ When our Founding Fathers penned the Constitution of the United States on July 4th, 1776, they realized that times would change and that their foundational document would need to outline the framework of the their most-cherished ideas and beliefs, yet at the same time allow for modernization, in order to stay relevant. Today, like the Founding Fathers, we need organizational governance, but we must have the tools, i.e. technology, to allow not only implementation, but also our ongoing future relevance. We need an integrative ‘middleware’ that ties together various technologies and systems; that not only manages the organizational data assets and policies, but seamlessly ties together our disparate line of business applications. A ‘middleware’ with the flexibility to allow specific groups or departments to manage their own processes effectively and efficiently within the context of the whole. That ‘middleware’ is here – it’s called Agile ECM.
For more info on Agile ECM, please contact us @ 888-400-9064, or visit our website.
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