The generation gap

My first experiences with computers didn't come in a corporate or institutional setting – they came at home playing with the (very) early personal computers my friends and I had access to.

Computers started out for me as something that is a very cool, fun way to use electronics. They didn't start out as some way to grow revenue or increase efficiency. If I wanted my computer to do anything I had to program it. If I wanted it to do something new or non-trivial I had to learn new ways, more complex, ways of instructing it. My ability to get something from the computer was intimately tied to my knowledge of what it could do and exactly how it could do it.

I'm in my mid-thirties myself, but most of the executives and managers I've worked with are 10+ years older than me. Many of today's corporate IT executives and managers are from a generation before home computers appeared, when computer technology was neither ubiquitous or affordable. They started off with the 'big iron' systems and worked their way down to PC's as PC's worked their way up the enterprise technology ladder. They had to engage teams of operators and programmers to get what they wanted from the technology – computers were in no way 'personal'.

The power of computers and networks continues to increase exponentially, thanks to Moore's law and Metcalfe's law. At the same time the ability of corporations and organizations to really take advantage of this power seems to be increasing in a linear fashion. The gap (let's call it G) between A) what it's possible to do with the technology and B) what most corporate IT is actually doing today seems to be growing. A-B=G and G is getting larger as time goes by.

Trying new things, innovating and getting 'outside the box' are associated with risk in corporate IT, and rightly so. The generation gap, however, seems to be expressed in how that risk is percieved. The 'previous gen' thinking uses a go-slow 'command and control' approach to IT, with predictable results. The 'next gen' is plugged into the technology a lot more and is constantly looking for ways to close the gap between A&B, seeing that an increasing gap is a risk unto itself. In the world we live in today corporate IT often seems to be dominated by the previous gen thinking, with next gen thinking relegated to startups and more entreprenuerial scenarios.

Is this holding us back? I can only wonder. What I do know is that the future always belongs to the next generation, and things are going to be interesting....

What do you think?