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From Resource, July 2007
Copyright by LOMA
The
Coming
Digital Native Workforce
As baby boomers near retirement, the face of your organization will
soon be changing. Is your insurance
company ready to handle a workforce of digital natives?
By Tammy
J. McInturff
Insurance industry executives have a lot on their plates today. From
trying to find innovative ways to reduce costs and increase efficiency to
dealing with security and regulation concerns, there seems to be an unlimited
number of issues. However, there is one issue that may not be getting enough
attention. As the baby boomer generation gets closer to retirement, more new
young college graduates will be entering the industry. These young workers will
create a new challenge for the industry because they grew up in a very different
technology environment than their predecessors. They think, communicate and work
differently than the baby boomers, because these young people grew up in a fully
digital world.
This
future workforce is already making an impact in the consumer market. From the
Walkman to MySpace.com, college and high school students determine what
technology survives and thrives in the marketplace and set the pace for
technology adoption. At LOMA’s Emerging Technology conference, Jacqueline
Zelman, Director, Leadership Institute, Information Technology Department,
University
of
Miami
, discussed the past trends that confirm the pattern and future technologies
that will set the agenda for technology.
Why
are Students Important?
Zelman
argued that companies should be looking at the technology use and skills of
today’s students to help predict the trends and technologies that will affect
our future. “Not only will
today’s students become your employees, they will also be the customers of
tomorrow,” she said. “These students will set workplace technology
expectations and standards. They will determine product success through
purchases and investments. This is why they are very important and why you need
to make accommodations for them as they enter your workforce and become
consumers.”
According
to Zelman, looking at student trends to predict what technology is going to be
popular is nothing new. For example in the 1980s, Sony came out with the idea of
creating a portable personal music player, which became the Sony Walkman. Zelman
discussed how, at the time, some people did not think there was a need for this
type of device. However, high school and college students really embraced the
technology and the Walkman became very popular among them first. Today the Apple
iPod is enjoying the same success among students.
From
Napster to iTunes
A very
similar thing happened with music downloads. Napster popularized the idea of
downloading music files from an Internet Web site. “About eight years ago,
anyone who was a CIO in higher education had a huge problem,” Zelman said.
“Kids on campuses began downloading music and media and they downloaded so
much of it that they jammed up our pipes.”
Illegal
downloads were a new problem only eight years ago on college campuses. These
downloads consumed thousands of Mbps of bandwidth and exposed hundreds of
campuses to liabilities. Universities had to buy additional bandwidth to
accommodate all of the illegal downloading that was happening. At the same time,
record companies began to track downloads and send out notices of copyright
violations. Colleges and universities were facing a number of issues—from
expensive bills for additional bandwidth to possible legal battles from
copyright violations.
Zelman
said that during this time The University of Miami decided it needed to do
something to solve this problem. “We bought appliances that did bandwidth
shaping,” she said. “We chucked them down a bandwidth so anyone who was
downloading illegally, we would bring them down to a very small pipe. Students
who were downloading legitimately could call and get permission to download if
it was part of a presentation and within the rights of copyright for educational
purposes. Those who were doing things illegally would not call. So that is
basically how we handled that very difficult situation.”
“So
here we have a situation where we had an illegal business that caused some major
corporations a great deal of difficulty,” she added. “Now Apple iTunes is
selling the same kind of downloads and it is perfectly legal. It is very
acceptable and the students actually identified that; it is becoming a huge
business.”
There
is a lot to be learned from this example. You can not stop the evolution of
technology. Record companies did not embrace new technology fast enough and it
cost them a great deal of time and money. Today CD sales continue to decrease
from previous years because young people prefer to download music from the
Internet through Web sites like iTunes. Music industry executives still have not
found a way to really cash in on this new technology. Although many record
labels are embracing the sale of music downloads and seeing some benefits, the
revenue from the downloads are not making up for the lost CD sales. On the other
hand, record labels and recording artists who have not embraced this change will
continue to lose even more money as consumers prefer more freedom with their
music selections. They do not want to buy the whole album anymore. Consumers
prefer downloading music because it allows them to buy only the songs that they
like. This technology will change the music industry and your company’s future
employees are a major driving force behind this change, Zelman said.
E-mail
to Texting
These future
employees even communicate differently than most people working in the corporate
world today. In corporations, e-mail is the way many of us prefer to communicate
with colleagues and customers. However, e-mail is not the preferred way for most
students today to communicate. “Students think that e-mail is way too slow and
takes too much thought,” Zelman explained. She said that students instead
prefer instant messaging. “Everybody is using text. It has become the primary
communication tool of teens and college students. In fact in academia, one of
the biggest problems that we have in the classrooms is that the kids are not
listening; they are on their phones. The real problem comes when you give exams
because they text someone to go look something up. So now we tell them not to
bring their phones to the exam and if they do we confiscate them.”
Gaming
to SIMs
Over the
years, gaming has changed the face of recreation. The online gaming industry
generates eight billion dollars worth of business. It basically outperforms
movies, videos, and music.
Zelman
discussed how in a sense virtual worlds are being created because the technology
behind gaming has gotten so good it is very hard to separate the game from
reality. “There is a popular game called EverQuest from
Korea
,” she said. “The number of concurrent players of this game is larger than
most small cities in the
United States
. How does that translate? What happens to that virtual world?”
According
to Zelman, gaming technology has evolved into education simulations, medical
simulations, military simulations and training technology. “The first time I
recall seeing a great deal of it was with Desert Storm where they were able to
match simulations in the battlefield.”
MySpace
to Eons
Today’s
young people enjoy staying connected to their friends through Web sites like
MySpace. MySpace is an online community that lets you meet your friend’s
friends. Most young people today in their teens and 20s have a MySpace page.
“It is unbelievable; MySpace has spread like wildfire,” said Zelman. “The
interesting thing is it has generated something for the boomers called Eon.
Basically Eon is a lifestyle social network and it talks about what you do after
you retire. It has become a social network for boomers online.”
Digital
Immigrants
The truth is
there are fundamental differences between a lot of the people that are in the
corporate world today and the young people that will soon be entering the
workforce. One huge difference is most people in the corporate world now are
digital immigrants—people who are members of generations before now. Digital
immigrants do not speak the language or understand the culture. They are slow to
adapt to new interfaces. They are also overly concerned with the impact of
technology on their routine or lifestyle. Digital immigrants worry about how new
technology will affect their lives and how it will affect their bottom line.
According to Zelman, digital natives couldn’t care less.
Zelman
quoted John Perry Barlow who said “On the most rudimentary level there is
simply terror of feeling like an immigrant in a place where your children are
natives…”
She
said, “This is what happens to old engineering professors, they get up in
front of the class with yellow sheets of notes and start talking about what they
have taught for the last 30 years. Meanwhile the students are looking on the
Web. The bottom line is the students are digital natives. They want to learn the
way they are used to learning. They cannot cope with these old teaching
styles.”
It
is true nobody likes to change; it is really difficult. Digital immigrants are
ambivalent about investing time and effort to try out new possibilities. “We
tend to be very worried about investing our time learning something new,” said
Zelman. “Digital natives will sit there and work at it until they get it. But
they will get it so much faster. So for a digital immigrant if you have tried
your best and you have failed miserably the lesson is just never try.”
Digital
Natives
The young
people that will soon be entering the workforce are digital natives. They grew
up in a digital world. “The term Digital Native was coined by Mark Prensky
author of Digital Game-Based Learning and Founder and CEO of Games2Train,”
said Zelman. “He defines a digital native as someone who has been surrounded
from birth by and using computers, video, iPod, cell phones and all the other
toys and tools of the digital age. Today,
children are using the computer at ages as young two or three. As soon as they
have the motor skills they using the computer. These three-year-olds are also
asking for cell phones because their nine-year-old sister or brother has one.”
Digital
natives work differently than digital immigrants. “This generation that has
come into the schools would rather turn in a multimedia presentation than just a
written paper. Text is not their first choice. They like media, sound and they
are very adept to putting everything together. These are the people that will be
coming into your businesses. They don’t want a review course on PowerPoint or
Excel. They have been using these things since they were very young.
It is actually being taught in the elementary schools. Digital natives
think and process information fundamentally differently from their
predecessors.”
Digital
natives are very comfortable in this digital world. “They love its
possibilities, nothing bothers them about it,” said Zelman. “They connect
quickly with people, even strangers. They don’t care. They are looking for
information. They are able to go out and gather information from many sources
very quickly and they are highly impacted by the technological changes. If you
cut off their access they scream like crazy. They are totally unconcerned with
consequences unless it means going to jail; at that point they are concerned.”
Zelman
said that digital natives are ok with being vaguely right. “We are seeing this
in papers or presentations because they are so adept to finding things on the
Internet that they don’t realize that there may be a quality issue. They
don’t understand that the sources that they are seeking may not be accurate.
They are simply going out and seeking information and putting it together very
quickly and delivering it as a presentation. Their idea of research is very
different than a digital immigrant’s idea of research. So you need to look out
for that particular quality issue.”
Education:
Digital Frontier
Education is
the first area to experience this large volume of digital natives. “Today’s
students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to
teach,” said Zelman. “Digital natives bring their own consumer technologies
and figure out how to make them work in the educational environment. Their
pattern of using information is very different from digital immigrants. They
don’t go to the library to use the books. For them the library is a place to
study and get back online. Occasionally they may look at a book if their
professor has demanded it. But frankly it is not the same world digital
immigrants grew up in. It is a very different world. The teachers are having
problems with this unless they are very young. Today’s students want to be
entertained. They are used to a highly simulating environment and the professors
don’t understand why the students can’t learn in an environment that has
worked for 200 years. The other problem is that the professors don’t know how
to interact with the students because the students have another life on the
Web.”
Digital
Culture War
According to
Zelman, Gartner released a chart in December of 2006 comparing digital
immigrants and digital natives. Zelman said that the issue will affect all of
us. Today it is an issue for the teachers of these students; tomorrow it will be
an issue for their managers.
In
terms of information preference, according to Gartner’s chart, digital
immigrants prefer slow controlled release of information from limited resources
while digital natives prefer to receive information quickly from multimedia
sources. Digital immigrants also prefer singular processing and single or
limited tasking. They prefer to view text before pictures, sounds and video and
for information to be provided linearly, logically and sequentially. On the
other hand, digital natives prefer parallel processing and multitasking. They
prefer to view pictures, sounds and video before text. They also prefer random
access to hyperlinked multimedia information.
“Today’s
students like very busy Web pages,” said Zelman. “They don’t care that
much about the design of the Web site, they want the interaction. While,
university professors and other digital immigrants like very classical, clear
cut Web pages. Digital natives don’t care. In fact, they actually prefer the
busy Web sites.”
According
to Zelman, digital natives prefer to work in groups as opposed to independently.
“We teach students that they need to work independently,” she said. “But
digital natives enjoy sharing and working with many people at the same time.”
She said they also have different learning preferences. “They want to learn
something at the last minute just for that exam and for that period of time.
They are not as concerned with the actual accumulation of knowledge because they
deduce that if they need to know about something they will look it up and find
the information when they need it.”
Digital
natives also want instant gratification and instant rewards.
Zelman said that they want everything right now, in a millisecond
response time. “In the university, we always lead with curriculum guides,”
she said. “We carefully think these things out. Kids just want to have fun.
They want to be entertained as they are sitting there in their classroom and in
a job they want to have fun. Some people think it is a work ethic issue. They
want to have fun. They value that often times as much as they value money. They
don’t want to do what their parents do. They set very hard boundaries. So as a
manager if you are not aware of that you may think this is a single incident. It
is cutting across this whole generation.”
What’s
New?
With
today’s youth, content is king. Students want to be able to experience content
on multiple, portable, linked devices. They also want to be entertained. Zelman
said that we are now seeing the reemergence of edutainment which is a
combination of e-learning and entertainment. “A lot of companies that are
doing online learning or remote learning are partnering now with major media
companies to come up with what is basically edutainment, educational things that
you enjoy,” she said. “There is also a lot of interest in having multi-media
on the go—video iPods, V Cast Mobile TV, etc. People what to take their TV
programs with them.”
What’s
Next?
Zelman
looked at what might emerge as the next “disruptive innovation.” “A good
example of disruptive innovation would be the introduction of the PC,” she
said. “Before the PC came along the entire world was running their businesses
pretty much on a mainframe kind of mentality. Along comes the PC, which
developed quickly and consumers could see the potential.” The PC changed the
way companies conduct their business. Cellphones are another example of
disruptive technology.
Zelman
identified a number of possible future disruptive innovations including—the
re-inventing of healthcare, technology for Third World countries, Web 2.0, Open
source software, automation of revenue-generating business processes and
virtualization of hardware.
Healthcare
Innovation
We are
seeing is a tremendous change in healthcare from an IT prospective. According to
Zelman, one of the big issues right now is the healthcare and delivery
management for boomers. Boomers are getting older and healthcare costs are
rising, so taking care of them costs a great deal of money. “Businesses now
are using IT in management of disease monitoring,” she said. “The monitoring
is used proactively to try to determine a problem before it actually happens.
These types of innovations, low cost and ubiquitous devices with tremendous
capabilities, actually carry over into the workplace and into schools. Today, we
can detect a subtle change in someone’s gait. Technology solutions from
healthcare will impact the IT industry.”
There
are numerous innovations being tested in the healthcare industry right now, from
devices imbedded in packaging so that people can’t overdose on medicine to
sensors that can detect irritants in the atmosphere that can be worn by persons
who are sensitive to particular chemicals.
Robotic
devices may also play a new role in the healthcare industry. The RI-man robot
for example, can carry a patient. It can also distinguish smells. Researchers
are hoping to get it to the point where it can determine from a diabetic
patient’s breath whether that patient is in trouble or not. Today this robot
is still in the million dollar category and it isn’t rolling out in the
marketplace yet. But it is a good example of what may come.
Telesurgery
is also a new technology we are seeing in the healthcare industry. Doctors are
combining their efforts across oceans to perform surgeries and to teach. It
allows a surgeon in one country to actually talk a surgeon in another country
through a surgery.
Third
World
Technology
Technology
for Third World Countries is also going to have an impact on the future of
technology. People are working on re-engineering product design for low end cost
and value for emerging markets. “Nicholas Negroponte has come up with a plan
to have one laptop per child,” said Zelman. “His goal is to have the laptop
hand crank so that it doesn’t depend on electricity and to bring the price
down to $100. It is a work in progress right now they have the price at about
$120, but it is still not rolled out. Another interesting new solution is first
mile solutions in
Cambodia
. They are mounting access points on buses and motorcycles and they have them
drive a route and when they drive that route they update that information in
that particular city so it is kind of a patchwork but you need to watch it
because this will change ultimately what is going on in their rural areas. They
drive through remote villages to synchronize e-mail transmission and Internet
transactions.”
Web
2.0 and Open Source Software
There is a
lot of buzz in the industry right now about Web 2.0. Zelman said that Web 2.0 is
basically the fusion of business models and IT capability. “What basically
happens is the Web/Internet becomes the application and computing platform
lessening the need for expensive hardware and software solutions,” she said.
“People
are beginning to realize that they don’t have to build everything,” she
added. “They don’t have to invest money upfront. Vendors like IBM are
leveraging community based Open Source Software (OSS) like the Linux operating
system to lower costs.”
According
to Zelman, users are also beginning to demand that expensive software
maintenance fees be reduced in light of
OSS
inclusions.
Hardware
Virtualization
Companies
are trying to decrease the number of platforms that they are supporting and the
number of people required for maintenance. Hardware virtualization allows for
distributed assets to be shared based on need using commonly held standards.
Grid
computing allows many, distributed computers to be used together. Sharing
resources allows new groups previously excluded to share in innovation. More
colleges and universities are using grid computing. With grid computing small
colleges can contribute their resources. Zelman said we will see some of this
roll out into the commercial world.
Future
Trends
“Innovation
solves hard problems that are societal, not necessarily technological,” said
Zelman. “It is usually not technology that prevents you from achieving your
goals in terms of an IT project; it is usually politics or money. Innovation of
services using IT creates great value that ultimately can change the quality of
how we live our lives and that is part of the third world technology it is going
to change the way people are able to exist. Students as digital natives are
great IT innovators because they are not biased by the past. They can think
outside the box but you have to watch them with the details because they are
thinking outside the box and may not have researched this thoroughly. They are
able to do a great show but you still need to double check your resources you
need to have valuable backup. Technology may be a commodity according to
Nicholas Carr, but it is also a tool, and the way it is used can make all the
difference between success and failure.”
Change is difficult but constant in our lives
and our businesses. Charles Darwin
said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most
intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” The same type of thinking
applies to businesses. Over the years we have watched many businesses fail
because they didn’t respond to the changing world around them. How will your
company respond to the digital natives that will soon be entering your
workforce?
It
is no secret that insurance companies continue to lag behind other industries in
new technology adoption. In other words, there is going to be a lot of
competition with other industries for the top talent among these tech savvy
newcomers.
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