OMG!!! These digital natives...

I am a digital immigrant and a parent to 2 digital natives. Most kids born post 2000 in India are digital natives. My elder daughter born in Jan 2000 chewed on my blackberry in the same year as she was teething. Expensive toy to play with, considering my income then! Parenting kids who are digital natives is a lot more tougher than parenting the digital migrants and the real world kids. It gets worse if you as a parent are digital immigrant instead of an analog parent(is there such a word!). As a digital immigrant I carry the baggage of what is right and when is it the right time to use a gadget or be on internet or have a social network account, coming from a background where I grew up in an environment where all this was a figment of imagination! I never grew up with these devices living a virtual childhood on social networks, and hence have a very convoluted belief system. When I grew up it was simply un-imaginable that I would possess 2 sets of pens. Coming from a very conservative middle class south indian brahmin family, dad would inquire if I could write using both my hands simultaneously and multi-task to learn concurrently! I had no compelling business case to present that could excite my dad to investment in 2 pens! Well, I was not born a MPP (massively parallel processing) and hence I obviously could not. Not that money was an issue. It was more of "makes no sense" and "no business case" phenomenon. Same scenarios played out as my desire to possess new and more stuff expanded to shoes and tee shirts!   Choices that my parents had to make were about the movies we could see, the kind of toys we could play with, the choice of words we use in our everyday language, the food we ate etc,etc. As a parent, right from when my kid was 4 years old, the choices I was faced with were what gadgets they could play with, what is the right age to hand them a cell phone, now tablet and how soon is not late to get them on the social network. My prime parental task seems to be creation of a controlled environment for them to surf the net. Being digital natives, my kids have taken to cell phones, tablets, internet and social networking as a process of their growing up, as they took to learning how to walk, chew, cry when hungry and learning to talk!

I have serious issues with this. You cannot be on facebook unless you are 18, all their friends are and hence they have learnt how to lie about their age as early as at the age of 8. Now its perfectly ethical to do so, in their view, as it was me who created their account, and they questioned me on every field I filled up as a process of creating their account. Why cant there be a social network for the little digital natives so that they can stop learning the art of deceit from their parents. Schools ban cell phones instead of teaching them how to use them. Result: ts fun to sneak one into school, use it on the sly, fun to break the law and now having a cell phone is seen as cool thing to do, because its cool to break the law at school! I wish teachers had the maturity and sense to induct them to the world of tablets and cell phones, the way they induct them into the world of desktop computers at school these days.

As my elder one now goes 12 and calls herself a pre-teen, I am worried about the abuse and intimidation she would encounter at some stage on the social network. And, there are these boys element to deal with, not just in the real world but also in the digital worls...and some these might not be boys at all!. I have decided on a few parenting styles I will imbibe:
1) I will have one-on-one conversations with my kids explaining them the dangers of being on social network without guidance, similar to my conversation with them on how dangerous it is to cross the road without looking left - right - left and without parental support.
2) I will give them their privacy with the gadgets and on the social network and discuss with them on some of the issues I had and how I faced them. Tell them I here to support them and help them walk the path. Support them exactly the way I did, as they learnt to ride a bicycle.
3) Hand hold them as they get hit by intimidation and face issues at school with teachers who are digital immigrants and analog natives similar to the way I support them when they fall down and get hurt or fail a test and are scared to try again.

There is no running away from the fact that we live in three worlds, India, Bharat & Digital global village. As a parent we will have to teach our kids on how to negotiate the nuances of these diverse worlds as they grow.  Well sirji, 3G or No-G the essence of good parenting is at the core and this remains unchanged.

Bringing up these bubbly, ever jumping and never exhausting digital natives in my family, has changed the way I look at the new young digital immigrants - a species very close to digital natives who are recruited from colleges into the enterprise. This generation, full of acronyms (one actually had WTF on a ppt in a presentation to the core leadership in one of the companies I worked), a  BYOT (bring your own technology to work) tribe, arrives full of hope and dreams into an enterprise , soon to be bogged down and systematically tamed to medieval way of life if not to relative primitiveness. The boundaries imposed in this day and age in the enterprise is simply so criminal on this Gen Y and a self infected damage y the enterprise.Most enterprises dont realize this.In 1998, I was part of the workforce in an enterprise that debated on who should get wordstar and lotus 123 ( remember them from your previous lifetime?)  and in 1990 windows, word and excel as they found their way (pirated because my boss found no relevance for these in our business! ). Piracy into this organization took place, because I wanted to use them to create my project report that carried considerable amount of credits in the final year of my MCA. Look at the scenario now and what got accomplished using these tools by employees down the ladder over the years in many organizations in this country! My first employer has still not thanked me for having smuggled in windows, word and excel.

I am sure sometime exponentially revolutionary will happen as you expose social networking and free use of connected mobile devices in a protected network within the enterprise-connected to the internet. As a CIO today I would make some of the following my top priorities:

1. Select a few radicals (all Gen Ys are) and open up inkedin, facebook, google plus and twitter for them for 6 months with a clear brief to use them for business purposes. Observe and learn how they engage fellow employees, partners and customers on these social networks and see if they make sense to the enterprise's cause and decide on future course of action. I personally thing Google+ with its circles and capability to post content tpo specific circles makes it a best fit enterprise tool to engage the corporate's eco-system and a potential social network to integrate your ERPs, CRM , BI tools and financial system 
2. Identify digital assets I would port onto smart phones and tablets
3. Work with the digital natives to prototype their wild and wacky lifestyle into the enterprise fabric
4. Create a portal that outlines and explains my enterprise's mission, goals and describes the business we are in. Embed a digital marketplace (app store) into it where GenY could bring their mobile apps, show their capabilities based on which I could buy these apps.
5. Distribute thru the same enterprise app store my apps to my customers, employees and partners

More power to the Gen Y. People a couple of generations older had said during their lifetime, that they were living the most exciting phase life had to offer w.r.t automation and opportunities. I feel the same and say the same. I place my bets on the fact that the coming generations will feel the same way during their lifetime - recession or no recession. Thanks god for the fact that some things dont change!