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August 27, 2006
Millenial Culture Wars
Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.
-- J.K. Rowling
One of the massive changes every organization is going to have to deal with in the coming years is the arrival of the millenials in the workplace. These are folks who have been raised on the Web, IM, and SMS. They are digital natives, who think nothing about taking two disparate systems and tying them together with AJAX or whatever is at hand. This is going to be a scary time for a lot of IT organizations, especially ones who are led by digital immigrants. It will be the changing of the guard, the face-off between two cultures who are both large, ego-driven, and don't want to be ignored.
In my time in the industry, I have seen (and heard recounted) the history of a number of cultural conflicts:
- Mainframes vs. Midframes
- Midframes vs. PC's.
- Copybooks vs. Databases
- Databases vs. Spreadsheets
- Memos vs. Email
In each of these cases, the "old timers" resented the "young turks" who had no respect for how things ought to run. At the same time, the turks resented the fact that they had to work so hard to do somethng that was so obviously needed. In retrospect, it wasn't an issue of right or wrong, it was a question of new vs. established.
To learn more about the culture wars and more, take a look at architected.info
Posted by Morgan Goeller at August 27, 2006 9:45 PM
