No more IT generation gap

Society is in transition as it exits the industrial and moves into the information age - this is one of the key underlying themes to emerge from the Gartner ITxpo conference this week.

Most certainly the presentations are still aimed at what IT managers` roles are, what technologies are best suited for various organisational applications, how to obtain the best efficiencies from systems and how the best IT practices contribute to a company`s bottom line. However, there is an increasing trend for both the analysts and audience to question the role IT will have in changing society.

This is not surprising, as IT personnel are the most affected by these changes. They are the ones who have seen their place within the organisational charts shift from a heavily centralised model to being distributed around an organisation. For them, the horror this brings about is that once again they have to deal with their fellow human beings.

However, changes are far deeper than just that. Within the next 10 years a new generation of business and government leaders will emerge, and they will have grown up in an era where IT and various forms of electronic communication are taken for granted.

For [IT personnel], the horror this brings about is that once again they have to deal with their fellow human beings.

Paul Vecchiatto, Cape Town correspondent, ITWeb

John Mahoney, distinguished Gartner analyst and chief of IT management research, told me the transition the information revolution is condensing into 25 years took the print revolution 150 years to achieve.

"The first generation to grow up with print was the generation that fostered the European Renaissance. The big question now is: 'What will this generation do with the technology it has grown up with and taken for granted?`" he said.

Wolfgang Grulke, conference guest speaker and CEO of Future World International, tried his best to answer this question in his presentation by talking about "tsunamis of innovation" that sweep over and disrupt the world as we know it. These "tsunamis" will be enabled through technology, which will introduce the efficiencies into processes, thus allowing for further innovation.

And innovation will have its most fundamental impact on society, because it will change the way businesses operate and, after all, businesses are part of society. This means it will have a fundamental impact on government and how it interacts with its citizens.

For the first time at an IT conference at least one analyst actually gave scenarios on how governments will be shaped by the new information society, especially by those societies that are technologically enabled.

Public sector Gartner analyst Andrea Di Maio`s presentation should be seen by all those interested in government, because it gives the possible structures without the ideology that is normally associated with such presentations.

Gone are all the "-isms" that have characterised governments of the past and present. Rather, governments will have to decide how much they want their citizens to be empowered through IT. They will have to discover how they are going to deliver services to a populace that has more and more access to the corridors of power than ever before without having to resort to violent revolution of the blood and bullet variety.

Of course, IT security is a recurring theme and Jay Heiser, after his presentation, told me that as the information society evolves, then the security themes of today will too.

"What we may need in 2020 is rather an information trust officer at a company. That is someone who is trusted to take care of the confidential information. This is because we may lose Internet anonymity by then. Most of my problems with spam and viruses come from anonymous sources, not from people I know," he says.

Heiser did concede there will always be a demand for anonymity, but how that will be achieved is still open to debate.

How the next generation will react to this loss of anonymity is anyone`s guess, but the fact is that they will be knowledge workers and so will need a much different set of management rules than we know today.

Debra Logan, in her presentation, pointed out that while quantity was the measurement in the industrial age, this will not necessarily apply to the knowledge workers of today, or even tomorrow.

"Rather quality will be the most important measure and time will be the reward. Knowledge workers will need the tools that help them save time," she says.

Other analysts such as Steve Prentice and Nick Jones littered their presentations with anecdotes of how their children are far more online than they are. So the theme is recurring - people growing up with IT as a tool take it for granted as past generations have taken books and writing instruments for granted.

It is not IT that is maturing. Rather, it is the people who are using it. They are growing up with it, finding new and better uses for it, and leaving that legacy for the next generation to do the same. The gratification is that the present generation actually lives to see the effect of their achievements.