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 the Internet is vitally important as part of their daily life’s sustenance.
• Security? What Security? Seven of 10 employees admitted to knowingly breaking IT policies on a regular basis, and three of five believe they are not responsible for protecting corporate information and devices.
• Importance of Mobile Devices: Two-thirds of students (66%) and more than half of employees (58%) cite a mobile device (laptop, smartphone, tablet) as “the most important technology in their lives.”
• Mobility is on the Rise: Smartphones are poised to surpass desktops as the most prevalent tool from a global perspective, as 19% of college students consider smartphones as their “most important” device used on a daily basis, compared to 20% for desktops – an indication of the growing trend of smartphone prominence and expected rise in usage by the next generation of college graduates upon entering the workforce. According to Cisco, this finding fuels the debate over telecommuting vs. working in an office.

Although the results are hardly a surprise, it does sound a warning bell for IT and HR. Preparation is essential.

Writes Dave Evans, chief futurist for Cisco: “The lifestyles of ‘prosumers’ — the blending of professionals and consumers in the workplace — their technology expectations, and their behavior toward information access is changing the nature of communications on a global basis.”

In a recent article, Dino Londis of InformationWeek offers a solution:

“So what to do? Part of IT’s responsibility to steward consumerization of IT is to educate the user and HR on the greater risks that come with consumerization. If IT departments are just now coming to grips with consumerization trends, then HR departments are completely in the dark about it.”

California officially adopted the use of social media. But it’s hardly a Farmville free-for-all.

On Feb. 26, the state officially adopted the use of social media. But it’s hardly a Farmville free-for-all.

The state issued a policy that sets clear rules for its use, including a limitation to only authorized users who have been trained regarding their roles, responsibilities and security risks. (View a PDF of the policy here.)

The document states: “State agencies are encouraged to use social media technologies to engage their customers and employees. Many state entities, including the Governor, have used these communication channels with great success but as with most technologies, there is a measure of risk that must be addressed and mitigated.”

In addition to the policy, the state issued a five-page “Social Media Standard,” which includes a few interesting clauses (read the full document in PDF form here):

No. 8: “Users shall not utilize tools or techniques to spoof, masquerade, or assume any identity or credentials except for legitimate law enforcement purposes, or for other legitimate State purposes as defined in agency policy.”

No. 9: “Users shall avoid mixing their professional information with their personal information.”

And, No. 10: “Users shall not use their work password on social media web sites.”

Participating agencies must comply with the policy by July 1.

Related reading: “What We’re Reading: If  Harvard Says So Edition” | “Social Media: The Elephant in the Office”

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It’s like watching your siblings bicker at Sunday dinner. Ugh. Enough already. Bring on a solution.

With the current state of customer service, a renewed focus would be a welcome change.

Look at current tech publications and you will surely find a rant or three about horrific customer experiences (for a recent one, see CIO.com’s “Tech Vendors Behaving Badly”). Search Twitter for “customer service” and you will find scores of tweets cursing the ineptitude of Company X and Company Y.

It’s like watching your siblings bicker at Sunday dinner. Ugh. Enough already. Bring on a solution.

You can start by taking note of a recent book, “Your Call is (Not That) Important to Us,” written by Emily Yellin (http://www.emilyyellin.com/) and featured in a recent AARP Bulletin story. Yellin, a journalist, wrote the book after enduring a particularly frustrating customer service experience herself.

Her book presents a fresh look at the customer service industry, and offers the average person some insight into the reasons many companies opt to automate and outsource to foreign companies.

Here are a few numbers from the AARP piece: According to Yellin, Americans contact customer service 143 times per year, or 2 to 3 times per week, on average. The average cost to companies with an American-based call center is about $7.50 per call. Outsourcing to another country knocks the price down to $2.35 per call, and letting customers take care of the issue themselves through an automated system drops it to about 32 cents per call.

The AARP reporter asked Yellin about the declining quality of customer service. Here’s her response: “What has happened increasingly, especially in the last five years, is that many companies haven’t paid attention to customer service and continue to view the success of a call center from their own viewpoint — as a cost whose success is based on the number of calls they can handle in an hour.”

Bingo. Just because a outsourcer can take thousands of calls a month at a bargain price doesn’t mean they can actually resolve issues. Bye-bye company cost savings, hello customer (and employee) rage.

This is where the new technology comes in. In the past, miffed customers had few outlets for their rage. Today, they have Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and a horde of sites that encourage commenting and reviews. A company can only ignore criticism for so long.

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Still, all our readers cared about was learning how to use a secondary axis in Excel, how to change BlackBerry calendar views, and why help desk techs are so surly.

Here’s a list of our top 10 posts from 2009. Read and enjoy.

10. Get It Together: 5 Ways to Stay Organized in Outlook
9. 5 Lessons to Learn Before Outsourcing
8. A Kinder, Gentler Help Desk
7. Top 5 Most-Asked Help Desk Questions
6. 7 Productivity-Boosting iPhone Tips
5. Out of Office, Out of Mind
4. How the Help Desk Earns its Bad Reputation
3. Follow the Format: 5 MS Word Tips for Managers
2. 4 BlackBerry Tips Every Manager Should Know
1. Management Tool Best Practices: 3 Excel Tips that Promise Charting Greatness

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Training is likely the number one way to get more out of Office, or any software for that matter.

Tweeting in Traffic is OK… in Venezuela

Whoever says Twitter is an ego-driven time-waster should spend a day in a Caracas traffic jam. In a recent Bloomberg News article, reporter Daniel Cancel writes about the Twitter revolution in Venezuela. Because the country’s gasoline is so cheap, there are twice as many cars than the roads can handle — which, naturally, means ample traffic jams. Enter the BlackBerry, Twitter and @Trafico, which Venezuelans are using to navigate their way through the gridlock.

Venezuelans, Cancel notes in his article, are way ahead of the rest of the world in terms of using Twitter as a traffic tool. And, for anyone concerned about Tweeting while driving, average speeds in Caracas are 7 to 9 miles per hour. Read the story here.

The Beauty of Recession: Increased Adaptability

November’s Chief Learning Officer offers up the finest in Glass-Half-Full news with “Recession’s Silver Lining? Increased Adaptability,” which reports that American workers have become more flexible in the past few years. Some highlights from the piece:

• 57 percent of business leaders say the people in their department or organization are more adaptable
• Senior executives and managers say their colleagues are more knowledgeable (50 percent) and more productive (44 percent) compared to a few years ago

The lining isn’t entirely shiny, however. The same survey found that employee happiness has decreased.

(The survey was conducted by NFI Research, a U.S.-based research firm that identifies and analyzes trends and attitudes in business, organizational management, information technology and organizational behavior.)

Read the full story here.

Office: It’s Here to Stay

Everyone’s talking about The Cloud and how it will revolutionize the way we work. The reality, however, is that many companies – 78 percent, according to Forrester Research – will not be switching to it from much-maligned Office any time soon.

The Office suite — and Office 2007 in particular — may be despised across the board, but for many workers and IT leaders, it’s all they have to work with. Their job is not to critique it (publicly at least), but to figure out the best way their employees can use it.

This week, CIO.com offers a trio of tips for “making the most of” Office, and it’s a good read. For the first tip, author Shane O’Neill suggests that IT leaders divvy up their workers by the applications they use most frequently. Not all employees need Access or PowerPoint, for example. Others work mainly in Outlook. By determining how much of your workforce actually needs full Office functionality, he writes, you can cut costs.

In another tip, O’Neill merely hints at the issue of training, which deserves more attention. Training is likely the number one way to get more out of Office, or any software for that matter. Back in May, I wrote about the troubling trend of “oversoftwaring,” which is when companies install up-to-the-minute software on its workers’ computers but do not teach them how to use the new features. In that post, I pointed to an Accenture survey in which researchers found that organizations use only 64 percent of their enterprise systems’ basic functions. In the same study, about a fifth of respondents said they didn’t use certain features because they didn’t have the time to learn how.

Read O’Neill’s piece here.

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Mashable.com’s Pete Cashmore writes this of lists on CNN.com: They cut down Twitter’s noise and arguably make it more useful.

Indeed, lists — and “how-to” guides and the like — enable you to break down large amounts of information into easier-to-use bits. And that’s the essence of what we do in software support. Some of our more list-like posts continue to get ample clicks, perhaps because of their utility. Among them:

4 BlackBerry Tips Every Manager Should Know

7 Productivity-Boosting iPhone Tips

5 Microsoft Word Formatting Tips

Windows 7: What IT and End-Users Need to Know

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Yesterday, Best Buy shocked customers with a whopper of a deal: a 52-inch Samsung HDTV for $9.99. Orders came in and credit cards were charged. Some customers attempted to buy up to 10 televisions each.

Best Buy issued a statement saying it would not honor the pricing error, so it may have saved itself heaps of money. Some companies haven’t been so lucky.

It was a mistake, of course, and the company corrected it promptly. The sale price should have been listed as $1,699.99. Still, customers were miffed, and Best Buy had to get to the business of refunding credit cards that had been charged, and doing a little reputation management via its web site, on Twitter, and elsewhere.

Best Buy issued a statement saying it would not honor the pricing error, so it may have saved itself heaps of money. Some companies haven’t been so lucky. Foul-ups involving a few decimal places may seem innocuous, but even the smallest mistake can cause millions of dollars in damage.

Consider the results of a landmark Dartmouth College study, which I wrote about in April. It offers a clear picture of what’s at stake.

For the study, researchers looked at the quantitative impacts of errors in operational Excel spreadsheets from five different companies. Among the more notable findings:

• Within a single organization, spreadsheet practice can range from excellent to poor.
• Some organizations use spreadsheets that are riddled with errors and some of these errors are of substantial magnitude.
• There is little correlation between the importance of the application or the risk involved and the quality of the spreadsheet.

The researchers also identified the major symptoms of poor spreadsheet practice, including chaotic design and complex formulas.

“In the hands of experts,” the researchers state, “complex formulas can be used to great effect.” When novices get their mitts on them, however, errors abound.

And some of those errors can cost companies millions of dollars – in the study, researchers found at least one mistake that could have cost a company more than $110 million.

Although the study is two years old, its findings are as applicable today as they were when the researchers embarked on the project. They may be even more so in the current economic climate, in which companies have fewer employees and just as much work to be done. (Jen Darr)

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I sure will be happy when it finally gets itself settled. Every day the media feeds us findings of new studies, fresh reports, and the latest arguments from industry experts about social media’s productivity-boosting power or time-sapping potential.

The outrage over the outage proved that social media matters.

Here are highlights from this week’s stories:

Marines: The Few, The Proud, The Banned
Last week also brought news of the United States Marine Corps banning sites like Twitter and Facebook on military networks. The Marines cited security concerns. We think they’re just too rigid to wrap their minds around the whole Web 2.0 mess.

CIO.com blogger C.G. Lynch responded to the Marine social media ban with a post urging other organizations not to follow the military’s lead. For organizations that don’t have national security at stake, he asserted, banning Twitter and the like is hasty.

“For every employee that accidentally leaks a business deal on Twitter,” Lynch wrote, “four others connect with people that day who bring in new business.”

Lynch wasn’t as harsh on the military as we were. While he pointed out social networking’s potential for keeping the ranks in touch with family and friends, he conceded that the Marine Corps had good reasons for banning it.

Study Time
Two studies of note came out in the past few weeks. One, from Proofpoint Inc., found that 34 percent of American companies have been hurt by the exposure of sensitive or embarrassing information in the past year, and 45 percent are worried about such information being leaked via Facebook and Twitter.

Another study, by Nucleus Research, offers up some scary stats for managers:

• 77 percent of workers have a Facebook account
• Of those with accounts, almost two-thirds access Facebook during business hours
• 87 percent of them couldn’t define a clear business reason for using it

If there’s one takeaway from these two studies, it’s that companies should stop ignoring social media. Whether they choose to embrace it (think Zappos) or do the equivalent of covering their ears while repeating “I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you” (the Marines, see above entry), it must be addressed.

Social Media: The New Drug
Borrowing a concept from the smartphone realm, Computerworld quoted a source in an article last week who declared that the public has become addicted to “social media crack.” The mag ran a piece about Twitter’s Aug. 6 outage, and addressed the effect the two-hour lull had on users.

The outrage over the outage proved that social media matters. That’s what Computerworld says, and that’s what experts say. If people are so smitten with a new technology, one that has the power to boost business, why wouldn’t you figure out how to use it to your company’s advantage? Not doing so is just silly. (Jen Darr)

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According to a recent study by Nielsen Research, Twitter saw a 1,382 percent growth from February 2008 to February 2009*. What’s more, 62 percent of respondents said they access Twitter from work only; 35 percent access it from home only.

This is what we do know: Twitter (and LinkedIn, and Facebook, and MySpace…) is wildly popular, and is used mostly at work. What’s unclear, however, is how to manage it in the enterprise.

Your options include ignoring it and blocking its use, or devising a plan that teaches employees how to use it without sullying your brand or exposing the company to security breaches.

If you are like half of the companies out there**, you have opted to ban it, which is akin to believing that if you cannot see something, it isn’t there. That worked — sort of — when you were a kid hiding under the covers from monsters, but it doesn’t now.

That worked — sort of — when you were a kid hiding under the covers from monsters, but it doesn’t now.

Social media is here, indeed, and if you aren’t managing it, your employees are. And most likely they are fumbling around with the new technology, asking their colleagues for help, or spending unnecessary hours trying to understand hashtags and TweetDeck. It’s not the technology that’s draining your workers’ productivity; it’s the lack of understanding it that is.

(We won’t even examine the damage that untamed tweeting can do to your brand and data security. That’s another post.)

More and more companies are recognizing social media’s value — so much so that it’s quickly becoming a vital component of any business. Will you fear it or embrace it? (Jen Darr)

If you choose the latter, here are some how-to mini-videos to get you started:

• Tweeting from your cell phone
• Direct Messages versus @Replies
• My link is too long for the 140-character Twitter limit… what can I do?
  
• Replying to someone on Twitter
• What is RT and Fail Whale on Twitter?
• Using favorites on Twitter
• Why can’t I Direct Message (DM) on Twitter?
• Trending topics on Twitter
• Making your Twitter account private

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*According to a Nielsen report published in February 2009.
**In a survey conducted by security firm Sophos, 50 percent of respondents said their company blocked or restricted use of sites like Facebook.