Bob Zurek

The Generation Z CIO and IT Professional-

Generation Z is typically describes as those who are born sometime during the 1996 and continue through the 2000’s time frame.

So what will these Z Generation IT Professionals be experienced with. Unfortunately, none of the core IT analyst firms at talking about the Z Generation CIO or IT Professional so I thought I would take a crack at it.

Here is my prediction for the top ten characteristics.

1. Grew up in the world of SaaS and open source. If you needed to install software, then it should be available in the form of open source. Expects all internal projects to be developed using the open source model.

2. Grew up with a mobile technology and wonders how anyone could run a business without it. Insists everything be available on a highly portable digital device and everyone in the organization have a device. No exceptions.

3. Grew up knowing how to leverage the power of social networks for the benefit of the corporation including the likes of Twitter, Facebook and even LinkedIn. This includes the ability to build out these networks and use them to help build new products and technologies. The Z Generation CIO's will have a huge advantage as they have grown up as participants in many social networks. China will be a big source of these networks. Websites will be built by the Generation Z CIO to invite outsiders in to help build new and innovative products that have yet to be thought of by the enterprises internal employees.

4. Grew up using Instant Messaging and Skype and will insist that the enterprise use IM and Skype as a priority over email and that email will only be used if the communications can't be done using the features of the future enterprise IM platform. In fact, attachments will become passé and documents, pdfs, powerpoints will be found on internal wikis. Any messages flowing thru the organization will point to these attachments on wikis.

5. Will tap into offerings such as TopCoder.com  and UTest.com to supplement project teams. There will be a world of competing Topcoder.com like sites where the best coders in the world will be found to solve very complex algorithms and other challenging software projects facing the IT department. China will be a major provider of these teams.

6 Grew up with a complete understanding of the value of virtualization and therefore, their datacenter will be virtualized and the IT operating fabric will be cloud based, tapping the power of external clouds on demand to supplement internal resources.

7. Languages of the Generation Z professional will include heavy use of scripting languages such as Scala and parallel frameworks like Hadoop.

8. CIO and Generation Z IT Professionals will leverage the power of internet video and who will bring knowledge workers engaging video on demand capabilities for purposes of training and further skills expansion.

9. Intelligent Wikis will be the primary source of knowledge in a enterprise and will eventually do what data warehousing did for business intelligence. Furthermore, new internal employee generated communities will spin up to voluntarily to invent new projects during their off hours to showcase their creativity that is typical not known by the employer.

10. CIO's will agressively adopt Prediction Networks as part of the core business strategy to better help the enterprise guage where everything from sales to new product development will be successful.

No doubt we are in a serious world of change when it comes to IT professionals. This is very significant. Low cost, open source solutions with a network of highly skilled professionals living around the globe will enable these Z generation professionals to deliver solutions faster and at a much lower cost than ever experienced before. And as I mentioned in my last blog post, with a lot less complexity.