FASTforward09 kickoff and Don Tapscott
by Sandy Kemsley
It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged here: I’m not a regular FASTforward contributor, but I obviously did something right last year since I’ve been invited back to FASTforward as a contributing blogger. I’ll be cross-posting some of my entries over at my regular blog as well as Twittering. I also have to give a shout out to @JonGarfunkel for coining the term “thought tweeter” after I tweeted that if I heard the term “thought leader” one more time here today, something bad would happen.
The conference opened with Bjørn Olstad, FAST’s CTO before the acquisition and now a distinguished engineer with Microsoft, giving us a brief introduction to the conference theme – engage your user – and ran through what we can expect over the next few days. You can check out the agenda on the conference site, but the highlights (for me) include Clay Shirky and Charlene Li.
Up first was Don Tapscott covering some of the material from his recent book, Grown Up Digital; I read and reviewed it recently and although I agree with some of his observations, I think that he’s dead wrong about just how different the Net Generation is. I’ve also seen him here last year, at the Enterprise 2.0 conference and on various webinars, and find the material to be a bit of a one-note song. I suppose that most other audience members haven’t seen as much of him as I have, so this might have more appeal.
I think that his best ideas – both in the recent book and in today’s talk – are about the Net Generation in the workforce: changes in expectations, and the change in the working environment to accommodate them. However, as I point out in my review of his book, the current economic conditions are changing some of those attitudes (at least temporarily), as the Net Gen sucks it up and just gets a job, regardless of whether their employer allows them to access Facebook from work. At some point, however, the Boomers will eventually take what’s left of their savings and head for a retirement village in Florida, and employers will be back competing for this generation’s attention. By then, the employers better have listened to at least a bit of what Tapscott has to say.
