Generation Y: future custodians of your data
by James Turner
As Generation Y ‘comes of age’ and begins to dominate the workforce, James Turner considers the problems associated with bridging the generation gap in the IT security realm.
As an analyst, I’m much more interested in asking people questions and listening, to generally avoid “leading the witness”, so I like following the conversation to see what’s going on people’s minds.
When a topic comes up in a range of conversations, not only with IT managers but also with other business managers, it gets my attention.
This is particularly true if the topic is one which vendors are not pushing.
So, it was of great interest to me that people were talking about the problems they were having with their Generation Y staff.
Generation Y (also known as Gen-Y) is considered to be those who were born between 1980 and 1994.
The prevailing sentiment from the managers I have spoken to is in the difficulty in hiring and training Gen-Ys, how to curb their remuneration expectations, and how to keep them from leaving once they get bored.
“They’ve been here five minutes and they think they’ve got what it takes to be the CEO”, was one memorable comment.
Conversely, Generation Y workers have told me that the mature workers in their organisations are unimaginative, scared of change, out of touch, think experience counts for everything, and (unsurprisingly) antagonistic to younger people.
Why is this important to IT security?
The alarming point for me is the area of lost industry knowledge.
If for no other reason than our collective self-interest, we should be instilling Gen-Y’s now with the hard earned lessons of the last few decades of IT.
How we lead them, how we train them, and the behaviours we model to them will come back to visit us when we no longer hold the reins of power.
Because it will be our pension records, our banking details, our health records, our transaction receipts and all our online data which Gen-Y will one day be responsible for managing and protecting.
The series of population pyramids shows the progression on Generation Y (highlighted in blue) as they age in relation to the Baby Boomers (highlighted in yellow).
In 2018, about half of the Boomer population will be eligible for retirement (65 years or older).
In 2028, nearly all the Boomers will be eligible for retirement.
To help IBRS clients address this challenge I wrote a research note, “Generation Y: Why Baby Boomers should be nervous”.
In my research note I observed that in the coming decades it will be the Gen-Ys who are running the IT departments, setting security policies, managing resources, allocating budgets, rewarding performance, and setting the culture of IT groups.
While it may be tempting for some to dismiss the perceived challenges of managing Gen-Y as merely an eternal theme of older generations throwing their hands in the air with despair over the young ‘uns, the difference is in the environment.
With any great system of power that humans have invented, access to it is usually restricted to a select few.
But the Internet is very different; the potential power of the Internet grows with the number of unfettered users.
Generation Y faces the paradoxical challenge of limitless information with limited knowledge.
The job of Baby Boomers needs to consciously evolve to include mentoring, succession planning and knowledge transfer.
IT managers thinking about retiring in the next ten years must be coaching their Gen-Y staff with a strategy of inclusion.
Over the last 50 years the IT industry has accumulated a fair swag of valuable knowledge; principles, frameworks, concepts, standards, guidelines and best practices.
As Baby Boomers retire, their intellectual property walks out the door with them.
What knowledge-sharing strategies are in place now in your organisation to ensure that the judgement that comes from experience is not lost?
The data you save may be your own.
About the author: James Turner is an advisor with IBRS, an Australian company that provides research and advice to IT and business managers in Australasian organisations. James specialises in the IT security sector. www.ibrs.com.au