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Millennials unlikely to disrupt workplace

Simnikiwe Mzekandaba
By Simnikiwe Mzekandaba, IT in government editor
Cape Town, 28 Sept 2016
Phones, tablets, laptops and wearables are now omnipresent within business, says Gartner's David Willis.
Phones, tablets, laptops and wearables are now omnipresent within business, says Gartner's David Willis.

The future business environment will be mobile and app-driven, but there are certain aspects of the traditional workplace that won't be done away with.

This is the view of David Willis, VP and analyst at Gartner, commenting on the impact of millennials on the digital journey of organisations.

Willis made the comments during his presentation of the key technology and market trends in the mobile space on day two of the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2016, in Cape Town.

Because the future workforce demands better features and new experiences, the conventionalism is to say millennials won't do e-mail, for example, but the reality is that they will do e-mail as long as the business requires them to do so, said Willis.

"Saying millennials won't do e-mails is like saying they won't sit on an office chair. They will adapt at some level but they also have pretty high expectations for usability and a degree of choice."

The proliferation of mobile devices means that phones, tablets, laptops and wearables are now omnipresent within the business environment, reinventing the way people interact and work, he said.

"When you are dealing with people who have lived in an always connected world and have had a choice of devices and have never read an instruction manual or a user manual, they have very high expectations about what they want and what they can do when they get to the workplace.

"It will be hard to send them to a class to learn how to do something, but the assumption is that things will be intuitive on the devices that they want."

According to Willis, the move towards creating a digital workforce is not only driven by millennials' expectations but is part of prioritising today's tech users.

"The idea is to create a workplace environment that is much more like the consumer environment, not only because millennials have expectations but because it also makes them more productive."

If we can understand the end-user's intent and get all the technology out of the way, we can actually get more work done, he stated.

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