Portfolio Life .net

“…Not only do younger generations perceive technology differently from their elders, including the CIOs and other executives who manage IT organizations and corporations, but they use it differently, too….

“Wikinomics author Don Tapscott tells a story of a young woman who doesn’t use e-mail, instead relying on instant messaging, texting and posting on Facebook to communicate. ‘E-mail is for old people,’ she told Tapscott. ‘Maybe I’d send an e-mail as a thank you note to the parents of a friend.’”

The accelerating impact of digital technology on how businesses are organized and managed is beyond question. E-mail, BlackBerries, instant messaging, blogs, Web conferencing and wikis are all part of the mix. Are these tools to jump-start innovation and collaboration, or mainly an always-on distraction?

There is a debate. Yet companies are increasingly embracing the new technology and habits, fostering a hurry-up workplace that has been called Enterprise 2.0.

…We’ve recognized, and now embrace, our biggest challenge — the changing nature of time. The relentless pace of technology improvement continues to make time management more and more critical for business leaders. While this has certainly long been true, the big difference now is the immediacy of information and action. Technology’s primary role has long been to speed up the transfer of information but now we increasingly contend with its unpleasant byproduct, information overload.

There are distinct consequences to this new age of “Instant Information.”…

…To explain, Mr. Schmidt steps up to a white board. He draws a rectangle and rattles off a list of things that can be done in the Web-based cloud, and he notes that this list is expanding as Internet connection speeds become faster and Internet software improves. In a sliver of the rectangle, about 10 percent, he marks off what can’t be done in the cloud, like high-end graphics processing. So, in Google’s thinking, will 90 percent of computing eventually reside in the cloud?

“In our view, yes,” Mr. Schmidt says. “It’s a 90-10 thing.” Inside the cloud resides “almost everything you do in a company, almost everything a knowledge worker does….