The “Millennials” — born between 1980 and 2000 — have an innate ability to use technology, are comfortable multitasking while using a diverse range of digital media, and literally demand interactivity as they construct knowledge. Millennials lack the workaholic drive of their burned-out predecessors, but they compensate by using many technologies — often simultaneously — to get the job done quickly and have a personal life as well.

They demand interactivity as they construct knowledge! I’d like that expanded. Knowledge construction is a weighty pasttime, might they also be capable of managing it? Probably not yet because they require some experience in life. We’re told to respect what presumably will amount to their ideas on constructing knowledge, because they really do need respect. If you must have a personal life, interactivity is useful. Actually upon further reading,

Forrester’s data shows that they like social networking tools and learning online (for example, blogs, IM, Friendster-type sites, and eLearning), which mean jobs must connect people with each other and to the Web.

It’s explained. Because an employee likes blogs and instant messaging and social networks, it follows in this extraordinary leap, that the workplace must connect people with each other. I wonder if they meant by “connect” that the workplace connect people using those same internet sizzling pans of gadgetry they called out. Because if they only meant people need to “connect” like, “I’m totally connected to my cubemate, we have this intense reciprocal understanding of when to tell marketing to twiddle their dodils.” People in the workplace need to connect just via the regular course of the workday, if you cannot communicate, you’re probably not going to be able to work very effectively–that’s true even for jobs that require intense alone time, at some point you’ve got to divulge your work or talk to people. Here I am blogging, and I’ll tell you straight up, it’s not really something that does a lot to connect you with other people. It does a little. Rutting does a lot.

The American Bar Association has a similar reading on some of this, with its quick guide published on mentoring millenials.

Mentoring Do’s: Structured, supportive work environment, personalized work, interactive relationship, be prepared for demands, high expectations

Note the “interactive relationship” part.

I found Generations at Work‘s excerpt from a Claire Raines piece more informative though corroborating the general ideas.

Let me work with friends. Millennials say they want to work with people they click with. They like being friends with coworkers. Employers who provide for the social aspects of work will find those efforts well rewarded by this newest cohort. Some companies are even interviewing and hiring groups of friends.

It’s nice to work with people whose company you enjoy. I suppose that is subtly different than working with friends outright. Still it’s interesting, can a company harness the creative energy of a group of friends that already are a proven collaborative unit? There is a sinister side to this: can the tribe be subverted to the will of the corporation? Lastly,

Be flexible. The busiest generation ever isn’t going to give up its activities just because of jobs. A rigid schedule is a sure-fire way to lose your Millennial employees.

I’ll say but it’s not just the millenials–why does anyone think it’s ok to submit one’s own life to the workplace? Except for a few, most of us would much rather pursue our lives with less slavery. If the millenials can do nothing else (a name improvement wouldn’t hurt but that’s usually not up to the be-labeled generation), maybe they can spread this mindset among the employer, dictator, and despot classes (also known as the C-level). Maybe the Forrester writers need some friends to interact with, their e-mail missives might multitask as more than mollusk maquillage.

The key to doing something practical with Grid is not to focus purely on the nirvana of automatic allocation and deallocation of computing resources to different applications on demand…

The report continues to talk about how to better use a companies IT assets through grid computing. Nice, this pool of computing loveliness that is so tappable–or someday soon will be. Still, a majority of companies haven’t figured out how to get into using this technology. This will be an area to watch and IBM seems to be ready to take a good part in it, but as the Register article says it may be missing the boat with its lackluster or misdirected messaging.

Anyway, that’s just a little something to tide people over. I’m on holiday and won’t be updating the ol’ blog for a couple weeks.

Come to me, my dear new year.

There is dynamic tension between an organization’s ERP backbone and best-in-class applications in the overall portfolio. Organizations should evaluate (at least once a year) whether to replace best-in-class applications with similar ERP modules (or, more rarely, the converse).

Sounds good. I get a little stuck with some parts of the article though (no, not the “return on intelligence”). Barry asks us to follow the “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” cliche. Then continues to offer a series of good advice type questions to reflect on. No, to busy oneself with. Namely, survey the user base, collect all kinds of information about what the application is doing for each of its users, figure out future requirements. Ok, but do all of this once a year? That could mean a lot of work. And this is all to begin figuring out if it will be a good idea to move from one’s best-in-class system to something the ERP vendor might be doing a better job of lately.

It sounds like it can make sense to be aware and do these types of reviews. It makes me wonder though, with all the work involved if there might be a better way to go about it. Once a year comes around pretty fast.

How can a company capture their requirements, research, user information one year, tie it their system’s functionality, and easily get an up-to-date comparison review the next? Not only does one have to track one’s own company information, but also all of the applicable vendor information in the market.

Really–I just hate the expression “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Demand for IT products and services will strengthen in 2005. Optimism expressed by respondents for increased 2005 budgets is growing stronger as year-end approaches. Budget decision makers in small businesses (fewer than 100 employees) are the most optimistic.

Typical Gartner bubble-head prediction. What is interesting is what they base it on. According to the web site “Gartner surveys over 75 CIOs and key decision-makers every week about their IT spending. Then Gartner analyzes data and determines if IT spending is more or less than anticipated for the current fiscal quarter.”

Compare that to the freebie I found at Technology Evaluation Centers, namely their “Q” report (they do offer a complimentary copy, albeit an old one). It tells us quite precisely (in the PDF teaser)

Key Findings for Q3 2004

• Globally, 42.2% of global inquiries had budgets of less than $100,000 (USD).
• In the Americas region, 52.9% of inquiries are from the manufacturing sector.
• In the Americas region, 54.2% of inquiries named Windows as the server platform of choice.
• In Asia-Pacific, 38.8% of inquiries are large multinationals with five or more locations, an increase of 9.9 percentiles from Q3 2003.

And those juicy bits, they say, come from over 5,000 global technology decision makers. Well it doesn’t take much effort to see which of these reports is more useful. I like some hard information as opposed to some nebulous predictions. And while not cheap, at least these guys were up front with their costs.

While I continue to have some weird fun with free analyst trials, I’m enjoying a good beer. Maybe I’ll see what Forrester has brewing next.

• 71% of middle market respondents simply were not persuaded that HRO provided enough value to undertake it or add to what they outsource today.
• 51% were unconvinced that HRO would be better than their internal HCM management.

(Aberdeen offered a thirty day free trial for its research… might as well take advantage.)

For the little guy that doesn’t have to worry about inter-region tax accounting, and other issues that spring from the good growth, outsourcing HR just doesn’t appear a benefit. I’m waiting for the day when companies outsource all their departments. What’ll we end up with? A general manager and someone called the CEO who occasionally drops in from out of town to yell corporate hosannahs into the rowdy stock-traders before heading to another company in which he’s the outsourced chief visionary.

One section in the report is called Human Capital Life Cycle Management–In-house or Outsourced? This gets defined into categories like employee records, HR employee call centers, training, employee assistance programs, performance evaluation, outplacement, health and safety. Looks like the employee assistance programs are the most likely to be outsourced already whereas employee records are the least likely to ever be outsourced. Isn’t that a relief. Help from afar and one’s personal info stays private. Disturbing though, that we’re now talking about the “human capital life cycle management” area. I wonder what kind of SLA they offer for CEO life cycle.

I suppose marketing personnel will finally have a reason to talk “cradle-to-grave.”

Contract life-cycle management (CLM) applications will experience rapid growth of 40% in demand in 2005, driven by the growing desire of enterprises to manage contract creation, negotiation, and compliance on an enterprisewide basis, to help ensure compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley and to capture savings buried in contracts with suppliers and sales or licensing revenues in contracts with customers or licensees of intellectual property. While supplier relationship management (SRM) and customer relationship management (CRM) vendors will make inroads with process-specific contract management modules, specialist vendors who offer enterprisewide CLM solutions will experience the strongest growth. Attracted by the strong growth in CLM, enterprise content management vendors will make their first forays into CLM but will experience little success in 2005 until they build up adequate capabilities through acquisition and internal development.

Since the birth of the US’s Sarbanes-Oxley Act, all the software providers seem to be touting their new methods for helping companies comply. Everyone wants to comply. Well, I suppose. It makes sense that it’s pulled in for the notion of contract life cycle management as well. I find it interesting that the topic of contract management comes up every few years. For a while the hot thing was CLM based in EAM, which works because often contracts coincide with the reception, use, and disposition of an asset. This is true at least with physical assets, most IT assets, and digital assets perhaps present some new nuances on the situation because nobody can really agree on how best to deal with the murky realm of digital assets and “intellectual property” stances. Anyway, Bartels mentions the utility in “…capture savings buried in contracts with suppliers and sales or licensing revenues in contracts with customers…” right-on except I take a bit of umbrage on the word “capture.” It reminds me more of the way these systems are marketed… sure you can use the to identify such savings potential, but acting on it is an entirely different story. The main failure point with contract management systems is similar to the failure of many CRM systems, it really requires sweeping organizational process changes. People need to have methods to act on this information and the organization needs to be structured in such a way as to respond to this action.