Dennis Howlett raised a question after my post on Pip Coburn’s book. [BTW it was by no means an attempt to critique the book, I haven’t even finished reading it yet.]
Let me try and put my point forward differently, see if it makes sense to you.
A change function has to bridge two or more different states.
TPPA, in the Coburn definition, is part of this function.
So far so good. And while some of it may seem “obvious” I have no problem with “obvious”, give me more.
I was then musing about the different states, the before and after.
And I came to this realisation.
Before Generation M, the before state and the after state were both “within the organisation”. So TPPA looked at what one used to do within the organisation as part of the basis for determining pain of adoption.
With Generation M, the before state is at home and the after state is at work. And with consumerisation and increased mobility, multitasking support and use of multimedia, with social software and opensource, the whole adoption model for Generation M is different. Where the before state is outside the firm and generational, TPPA is very high. This is not an issue of training. Generation M will resist what doesn’t make sense to them and vote with their feet and their fingers.
Does that help?
I’m pretty sure we’re agreed on this but maybe not the emphasis. There is an assumption that people will not make distinctions between work and home life. I’m not wholly convinced, even among teenagers who are arguably the first generation to have been exposed to computers from an early stage in their lives.
My 16 year old son Joe ‘lives’ in MySpace outside of school but well understands the need to learn and use programs that require more than the ability to click a mouse and tap in a few text message style words while in school. As I see it, the way for software designers to overcome this ‘difference’ is to somehow make business usage fun in a non trivial way. I have no real clue how that might happen but it intuitively makes sense. At least to me!
It’s also important to remember that home computing isn’t ubiquitous. There are many sections of society that don’t have broadband, or, for that matter access to a home computer. So designers will need to take this into consideration as well. Perhaps more so.
Where I do think this idea has significant impact is for new graduate hires post 2010. My sense is that having been exposed to an online only world, they’ll ask pointed questions about on premise, IT support, IT strictures, policies about in-worktime blogging etc. They will have a different worldview.
This I think has significant implications for the professions in particular. But that’s my bias in the first place.
We’re on the same page. They will have different views on device restrictions, internet and web application access, logins and signons, online and offline behaviour. Our current enterprise app set will wither into the background. And the four pillars will show up.
So we have to be smarter than we’ve been so far in the design and deployment of the business apps we give them.