Found this via Lou Paglia: ‘Digital Natives’ are Driving Web 2.0 Adoption into Your Business, which reminded me of the experiences some people reported at the IEEE Web Collaboration workshop, namely that companies that want to attract and retain good employees are well advised to provide them with the knowledge work tools these people need. This includes social networking tools, but also blogs and wikis, which they use to build up and demonstrate their expertise:
As these digital natives grow up, they’re moving into the work force, taking with them blogs, wikis, mashups, RSS feeds and other so-called Web 2.0 social networking tools that will enable them to collaborate more freely in an enterprise environment […]
and
They bring with them a set of expectations of how they will interact and the tools they’ll use to interact, and they can be woefully disappointed walking into organizations that don’t have some of the Web 2.0 tools that they’re used to using for building relationships and getting things done […]
So yes, even when we they aren’t really “technologically literate”, they are socially literate, i.e. they are building up and leveraging their own informal networks, and they see the benefits of fast and flexible (Web 2.0) tools, especially when they learn from their peers that the time and investment to come up-to-speed are quite low.
[…] workforce is on the rise, if only because adaptivity is built into their DNA, and they need their informal networks to get work done: Complicating matters is the fact that the very idea of a company is shifting away […]