Tomorrow’s talent, citizens of the future, tomorrow’s content and tomorrow’s enabling technology

Bill Parsons, Ewan McIntosh, Melanie Goody and David LeCore shared their insight on tomorrow’s talent, citizens of the future, tomorrow’s content and tomorrow’s enabling technology during the second half of day one at TFPL's ebic 2008 conference in Berlin last week.   

Bill Parsons argued that organisations would have to align with issues relevant to the future work force, such as the environment, to attract new talent. This new talent would also demand new technology which will enable it to operate and interact with others beyond what is seen today as the normal work environment. Another trend identified by Bill was that the future’s talented workers would largely determine their job prospects by location rather than vocation. Finally, Bill argued that there is a correlation between how enjoyable and fun a workplace is and its attractiveness to new talent.

The crux of Ewan McIntosh’s lively presentation centred on understanding “generation Y” and the technology with which they operate as essential to facilitate their presence better in society. Ewan spoke contrary to popular belief of gen. Y as lazy and self absorbed. He argued that generation Y are passionate about the issues which affect them. He illustrated this point with youth action which saw a demonstration of 500 mobilised, through Bebo, against planned school closures in Scotland, which largely led to the scrapping of the plans. 

TFPL's eminent KM guru, Melanie Goody, then took the stage and focused on the content of tomorrow. Using the “rear view mirror” in her forecasting, Melanie examined the themes of ebic in 1998, 2005 and 2008. In doing so, Melanie highlighted the trend in the KIM space where content sources have moved from structured and externally published material, to the ungoverned and unstructured digital universe. As such the content management problem for the foreseeable future relates to how new content can be governed and managed efficiently especially with the increase in storage costs that the exponential growth in content will incur. Nothing highlights this better than the fact that aggregated global electronic information is growing 60% a year of which 70% is created by individuals but corporations are accountable for 85%.   

In dealing with this complexity corporations should learn from past mistakes of enforcing the use of rigid systems and focus on implementation issues rather than technology in itself.

Tying in with Melanie’s closing remarks, David LeCore, outlined a seven step guide in implementing new technology in your organisation:

1. What is the problem that the technology will solve (what is the business case)?
2. Will the technology solve that problem? Pilot it and find out.
3. How long might it take for the technology to become obsolete?
4. Take advice and manage expectations.
5. Understand your own organisation in terms of its culture and ensure support from the very top.
6. The technology is just one component in solving the identified problem, consider other components such as employees, management, culture, process, content and budget.
7. And finally measure the benefits, set bench marks and compare the success of implementation, user participation and satisfaction and the impact of the technology on such things as KPI.
   

Alun Davies followed with many points which can be related to and echoed David Lecore’s seven steps. He encourages us to focus on the opportunities that technologies such as those encompassed by Web 2.0 offerand that there should be tolerance for the way people want to work.

The day’s conference proceedings closed with informal and simultaneous pitches by the ebic fellows (introduced last week) into the work and systems which had earned them their place as finalists. Delegates moved between 10 minute presentations designed to further inform delegates of their work. Delegates were given until Thursday, 5pm, to submit their votes. 

As a voter, it was a very difficult decision for me. All of the ebic Fellows were deserving of the prize as far as I and others could observe and it seemed unfair that three would ultimately lose out. Initially I opted to vote for the candidate to whose cause I could most relate. However, I decided that doing so would be unfair given that the finalists were chosen on the merit of what they had achieved rather than the worthiness of their cause but that hardly made the decision any easier as all had achieved remarkable results with the very limited resources that they have.