Bridging the IT Generation Gap - ' Culture Shocks '
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Carnival, with nearly 40 ships that
frequently travel to areas with spotty
voice communications, was quick to
grasp the benefits of IM via Blackberry
handheld devices. It's an effective
way to communicate across a
highly distributed environment, but
it breeds challenges of its own. "Our
messages can get very cryptic," says
CIO Sutten. "They might lack verbs
and context. I haven't capitalized a
word in years. It's another way of
speech." And it's a way of speech that
is commonly used among young
people who grew up on IM and
texting, which have their own patois
and grammar.
It's an efficient way to communicate
if you understand it, but, says
Sutten, 49, "It still annoys some people
from my generation." To overcome the
communication gap, Sutten has hired
portfolio managers to translate techspeak
and millennial-speak into proper
English, even if it takes extra time.
"They take our stuff and put it into
prose and business context," he says.
Video games are on the agenda
for this year's holiday party at Carnival.
"Our staff runs the gamut—
we have some older folks, but we've
acclimated to the younger style,"
says Sutten. "It's OK to be techie in
our culture." Spreading the youthful,
techie culture across the company is
something IT departments might do
to ease the generation gap. Says Cornelio,
"There are cultural distinctions
between parts of organizations, and
many times you will see one group
draw the rest of the company along
with them. We have a lot of people in
IT, and we can make a difference."
In many ways, younger workers
are ahead of the curve. Schneider
points to a general comfort among
Generation Y with diversity that is
critical in the global economy. And
in VF's highly globalized industry, he
says, "When a designer in New York
needs the same information as a
sourcing office in Asia, and they both
need it in real time, the demands
are similar to those of workers who
expect to be able to work when they
want, where they want."
For a millennial like Shell, that
kind of schedule just makes sense.
"Back in the day, everybody was 8:30
to 5:30," he says. "That's on the way
out. Now you have a BlackBerry on
your hip, and you are going to work
on your personal time every day.
You need to be at meetings on time,
but otherwise you can be flexible."
Still, Schneider acknowledges that
shift is not always easy for others.
"For a baby boomer like myself, it's
more of a burden to work at home,
to get on that conference call at 8
p.m. We may have to sell that softly
to older workers, while younger
workers are more accepting of it."
But regardless of age, he says,
that's the way we work now.
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