Imagine managing a stable of workers who knowingly disregard IT policies, who think your company’s social media and mobile device usage polices are stale, and who believe they are not responsible for protecting company information and devices.

It sounds like a network TV sitcom plot, but it’s not. It’s Gen Y, and, according to a recent Cisco survey, it’s a reality.

The future of work, according to Cisco.

For its annual Connected World Technology Report, Cisco surveyed 1,441 college students aged 18-24, and 1,412 employees aged 21-29 in 14 countries. The purpose of the study was to gain insight into the behavior and expectations of the next generation of workers, and how their demands for information access are changing the future of work. The study was conducted between May and June 2011.

Among the more notable findings:

• Internet as Basic Human Necessity: One of every three college students and employees surveyed globally (33%) believes the Internet is a fundamental resource for the human race – as important as air, water, food and shelter. About half (49% of college students and 47% of employees) believe it is “pretty close” to that level of importance. Combined, four of every five college students and young employees believe Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Consumerization of IT Cisco, FACEBOOK, Generation Y, InformationWeek, millennials, mobility, Twitter

Two articles came across my desk recently that were not related, but read as if they could have been written as companion pieces under one headline. The first looked at how social networks — and the people who use them in particular — can transform the way we work; the other examined the growing focus on strong people skills in IT.

Nowadays, it’s “more about what gets done than about what you know,” Schaffner writes.

The two pieces together illuminate the shift that’s happening in IT. Help desks are replacing rudeness with customer care, and beginning to see their role as enabling employees to be more productive, rather than fixing computers that have caught fire. This new focus on soft skills goes hand in hand with discovering different, more effective ways of collaborating.

In the first article, which ran in a recent issue of Fortune magazine, Cisco VP of enterprise Alan Cohen discusses how work has changed, from “local to global, from centralized to decentralized.” He mentions the significant investment in transaction systems, including ERP and e-mail, in the past decade to reduce business costs and redundancy. But those systems have had their run, and now it’s time for innovation and productivity to come from people themselves. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Customer Service, Social Media Alan Cohen, Cisco, Forbes, Fortune, Mike Schaffner