James Woudhuysen

Back in October 2001, the American educationalist Marc Prensky suggested that there was a fundamental difference between people who had been born with IT and those who had not. Or if you prefer, between “digital natives” and people who had come upon IT later in life ­ “digital immigrants”.

Then, in December 2005, analyst firm Gartner released a report that implored businesses to “explore consumer technology before the next internet revolution leaves them behind”. Now the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school, no less, puts the growing consumerisation of corporate IT down not just to lower technology costs and the need to innovate quickly using web applications, but also to the number of young and tech-savvy digital natives entering the workplace.

Everywhere I go I hear this story ­ how the young are just so brilliant with IT that we must adapt corporate IT to their expectations. I hear proud dads eulogise their kids for the ninth time; I hear teenagers being lionised by senior figures in local government and further education.

But you don’t have to be a grumpy old man to want to call a halt to the wider implications of shaping IT around the demands of young people.

Prensky made a very big deal of the plasticity of human brains and the changes that IT had thus wrought on young ones. He did at least acknowledge that “in our twitch-speed world, there is less and less time and opportunity for reflection, and this development concerns many people”. Yet he recommended that reflection itself be taught “in the digital native language” ­ and especially through computer games.

Last, for good measure, Prensky followed what has become the usual form by backing children over teachers: “Digital natives accustomed to the twitch-speed, multi-tasking, random-access, graphics-first, active, connected, fun, fantasy, quick-payoff world of their video games, MTV, and internet are bored by most of today’s education.”

But it’s a mistake to indulge youth. And in enterprise IT, young people’s facility with technology should not be mistaken for a grasp of how it works or how to improve it.
Today’s consumerisation of IT has some disturbing elements about it. Partly because of a crisis in management direction and legitimacy, adults old enough to know better play about at work more than they used to. That’s childish, and it certainly isn’t liberation.

Kendall Whitehouse, senior director of IT at Wharton, is much fairer and nearer the mark than Prensky when he notes that while employees often perform personal tasks around YouTube or Amazon, they also often work at home in their own time. In some industries at certain times, that might apply with special force to today’s youth.

Whitehouse may be right, too, to observe that employees have an increasing say over the technologies they use at work. But is that a good development? Work, I fear, is not a democracy ­ and an ageing specialist in IT may just know a thing or two more than a youthful graduate in media studies.

In fact, there is probably more that IT does to unite generations than it does to give the over-30s the dubious status of being “immigrants” to the digital world. The speed with which old dogs can learn new tricks should not be underestimated.
But when the consumerisation of IT becomes a cipher for its infantilisation,
I have to get off that bus.