Manage Gen Y employees and interns more effectively - Apr. 28, 2. NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Dear Annie: Once again this year I've been put in charge of our division's summer internship program, and to be honest, I'm dreading it.
I'm not a big fan of generalizations about entire generations - I'm a Boomer and never feel like the stereotypes describe me - but I find "millennials," a.k.a. Generation Y, just baffling. For one thing, they seem both overly ambitious and not ambitious enough. For instance, last year, one very bright and talented intern asked me how long it had taken me to get to my level in the company (14 years), then said he could do it in half the time.
Yet he wasn't a hard worker and left on the dot of five every single day, no matter what was going on. This year we have a new crop of 22 college seniors coming in, and we're going to expect them to accomplish some real results. Dear Open: Have I got a book for you. Tulgan agrees with you that not all members of any generation are alike. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Readers, what do you think? Enable richer business outcomes: Free your intranet with Web 2.0. I've been asked a number of times recently to succinctly describe the difference between using older, more traditional software models and things like Web 2.0.
Besides getting tired of level setting what Web 2.0 is in a given crowd (which does seem to be getting easier however), there's a growing body of knowledge to refer to that explains how Web 2.0 seems to directly address a lot of issues with existing software models in the enterprise. One of my favorites so far is Andrew McAfee's popular article about what he calls Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration in a recent issue of the respected MIT Sloan Management Review. While you have to pay a few bucks for access to a copy, which I can assure you is well-worth it, it remains one of the most compelling descriptions of the use of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, complete with a case study. Fortunately, the title of McAfee's piece says the important part. The Web 2.0 in the Enterprise Acid Test. Sharepoint and Enterprise 2.0: The good, the bad, and the ugly.
Depending on which numbers you look at these days, about a third of all companies right now are using Enterprise 2.0-style tools to enable collaboration and management of their knowledge.
This is in stark contrast to just three years ago when the only tools most workers could count on for communicating with others and sharing knowledge was e-mail, the phone, and if they were lucky, an instant messaging or content management application. It increasingly appears there is no such thing as Enterprise 2.0-in-a-boxToday's worker landscape is a surprisingly different place with the rising use of Web 2.0 applications such as blogs and wikis and other applications.
Use of public social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook are practically commonplace these days, even if not quite ubiquitous (a good percentage of companies still block access to these in fact). For the purposes of the discussion below, I'll examine where SharePoint is suitable for this particular (though very significant) use case.