Millennials aren’t the villains or drivers in consumerization

It’s a claim repeated casually in consultant white papers, news stories, and opinion columns: The consumerization-of-IT phenomenon is driven by Gen Y, now entering the workforce in large numbers. More important, the business and tech strategy around the technology you use and allow will be shaped by this new demographic wave.

Baloney — the millennials certainly bring their own habits and expectations to the workplace and the greater technology realm, but if you plan for the myths about this group, you’ll end up with a nonsensical technology portfolio and strategy.

The “social rules all” myth The biggest myth involves social networking. According to this belief, millennials don’t email or telephone, so you’ll need a social business strategy if your company hopes to communicate with itself and others. This is partly true: You should have a strategy for using social tools in business, but email and the phone can stay. Social tools are great for ad hoc interactions, especially asynchronous tasks, where posts can build over time and you can sort out the relevant bits from the stream. It’s less efficient than a phone call or face-to-face meeting to sort out an issue among several people, and it has none of the history and management of email — try finding that tweet from two weeks ago or the specs mentioned in it.

What is true is that millennials are very comfortable in short-burst, asynchronous information streams. But so were the younger Baby Boomers like me who in our early 20s were on Compuserve, The Well, and The Source messaging in chat rooms that frankly are not that different from a Facebook wall or a Twitter stream. At work, we adapted to the communication vehicles of the time (the phone and typewritten letters; email hadn’t really started) even if we used those newfangled technologies for pleasure and for work cliques. We did adopt email earlier than our older colleagues, just as millennials are adopting social tools earlier than us aging Boomers.

Likewise, millennials will use email because it’s still fundamental to business communications and corporate memory. Maybe one day social tools will do that, in which case it may well replaced the old system. Until then, millennials will adapt to the standards that work today as older workers pick up social tools where they bring value.

In fact, according to companies I’ve heard from, older employees are as eager to take advantage of internal social tools as the millennials, once it moves beyond the hangout or all-nighter bull session that young people seem to prefer. All young people, of any generation, love to talk to each other. All that changes is the medium available to facilitate it. It’s no accident that social tech has struggled to gain a meaningful foothold and yield greater productivity gains in business despite its phenomenal adoption for personal socializing.

Another reason not to get hung up on the alleged social imperative: New research shows that millennials are less collaborative and more selfish than previous generations, having been raised as their parents’ focal point. Their social activism is apparently a function of being forced to get through school requirements, not an innate need to contribute to the greater social good.

Of course, such studies are based on high school and college behaviors, which aren’t necessarily indicative of future behavior. After all, the “slacker” stereotype of the previous Gen X proved to be untrue. And the early Baby Boomers — the 1960s counterculturists — ended up as the force behind the 1980s’ “greed is good” and mass consumption culture, as well as the greater social tolerance of diversity and the desire to protect the planet. The millennials will evolve in their own way, as every generation does, and society will adapt to and shape them simultaneously.

The “mobile rules all” myth Another big myth is that millennials don’t use computers if they don’t have to. Everything begins and ends on the smartphone. That’s also hooey. Baby Boomers were active smartphone users way before millennials graduated from high school. Who do you think bought up all those BlackBerrys and Windows Mobile devices in the late 1990s and through the 2000s? Who do you think were the driving adopters of the iPhone, then Android smartphones?

Millennials are more comfortable with modern technology because they grew up in it. But later Baby Boomers grew up in the early days of the PC and the Internet, then the messaging devices; to the old fogeys of our time, we were the wunderkind who “got” technology. Today, we have several generations that “get” it. The millennials are certainly more familiar with some technologies than their forebears, but they’re not fundamentally separate from the rest of us in technological openness. I know — I was there and remember the news stories and magazine covers!

I’d argue it’s not the millennials who are driving the shift away from the PC but their predecessors, who form the ranks of the execs, business managers, sales directors, project managers, and so on that have been the prime adopters of the iPad and smartphones in business. It’s those people who proved that tablets weren’t simply “media tablets” or fancy Game Boys, as Gartner and others stereotyped such devices.

Here’s a simple proof of that theory: The devices aimed at the millennials with a singular social focus — Microsoft’s Kin, Palm’s WebOS, and Microsoft’s Windows Phone — are the ones that failed. The devices aimed at a broad range of computing, from games to engineering, are the clear winners: iOS and Android. They’re multigenerational.

The millennials will see such technology as natural, cementing the shift away from the traditional PC that the Baby Boomers initiated.

The “information security and privacy don’t matter” myth The third big myth often cited is that millennials don’t respect information security or privacy, and companies will have to give up on both. That’s a misreading of reality. People have always used information outside the proscribed boundaries. Back in my 20s, the technology of choice was the photocopier, then the fax machine, both recently democratized technologies. People used them to leak secrets to competitors and the press, to create “insurance” with offsite copies, and facilitate informal sharing for skunkworks and other projects. Now we use thumb drives, email, cloud storage, and the like. But nothing has really changed at the level of impulse for using information for unofficial and even inappropriate purposes.

Today, many companies are paranoid about information security, even though few practice what they preach. (Is your work PC encrypted? I didn’t think so. And is it hard to bring work to your unmanaged home PC? I didn’t think so, either.) But this paranoia is in many ways grounded in recent history, not fundamental generational impulses.

The series of economic scandals in the 2000s, from Enron through the financial fantasies behind the housing boom and bust that wiped out a decade of market value, led to laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley meant to tie up companies in red tape to slow down such shenanigans. And it’s caused some companies to try harder to shield their actions, given the rise in corporate distrust in even innocent activities.

Then there was the borderline paranoid reaction to 9/11, justifying for nearly a decade a ceding of authority to the police and other government security agencies in the name of preventing terrorism. In such an environment, it’s hard to trust anyone to keep data safe, especially in light of the effectiveness of socially engineered attacks such as spear phishing. A major industrial espionage campaign by China and other countries (the so-called advanced persistent threats) have stoked information security fears as well.

I believe the trend of information being moved to where it’s useful is standard human behavior regardless of generation, and as we slowly emerge from the economic meltdown and the 9/11 shock, we’re returning to normal actions. We’re now more educated on how we might be monitored or phished, and people can handle a culture of mistrust only so long before society suffers long-term damage. Individuals of all generations are now asserting their trustworthiness and more direct control over their lives, and in the process, they’re feeding the rise of consumerization.

Two details are different today: More information is now electronic, so it’s more easily distributed and manipulated. Also, people are taking control through a wide variety of devices, so it’s harder to bring back the police-state-like control we had in the 1950s (a Cold War-based episode) and, as some would argue, again in the 2000s (some of the 9/11 reaction).

I do think there is a difference when it comes to perceptions of privacy. With information stored and transmitted through the Internet, it’s harder to keep secrets — you can’t just move to a new town and change your name. Young people also don’t yet know what they’ve exposed or how it could be used against them. Neither did my generation in those early chat rooms, but those were private systems, and they’re now gone, along with the evidence of our young foolishness.

As reality hits home, you can bet your bottom dollar that the millennials will become more savvy about privacy in the new global electronic context we live in. Now that some malevolent or simply stupid companies are asking potential employees for their Facebook account passwords, the issue is in their face. It was already starting — remember the rash of reports a couple years ago on how employers would Google potential employees to see what showed up?

Society too will adapt. In the 1960s and 1970s, the general population quickly learned to ignore arrest records for protesting, at the time the equivalent employer poison. Given all the photos of half-naked adults and drunk teens on the Internet, society will have to make a similar differentiation between youthful indiscretion and truly troublesome behavior.

The value of millennials If you shouldn’t look at millennials’ alleged traits to define the technology portfolio and approaches for the next decade, should you just ignore them and expect them to do what the Baby Boomers do now? No, that would be equally naive. Millennials, like young people of any generation, are simply more familiar with nascent technologies and will be more easily able — as a group — to exploit them in unanticipated ways. They’ll remain bellwethers and sources of inspiration for how to think different.

Their upbringing and the social attitudes forged in the dramatic social and economic changes of the last 20 years will certainly color their attitudes. Maybe their teenage selfishness will lead to a new “greed is good” overindulgence period. Maybe the fact that they were forced to be socially involved and carted around in protected groups will allow for more effective collaboration in the workplace. Or maybe we’ll see something entirely unexpected.

As the millennials rise through the ranks, they’ll make their marks. For now, they’re one thread in the new technology and business fabric emerging.

This article, “Millennials aren’t the villains or drivers in consumerization,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Smart User blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.