X is not Y and is surely not Z in the Digital Age
Witnessing over 20,000 women in tech attendees at the Grace Hopper Conference 2018, the majority of those by pure observation seems to be in their early twenties, hence Generation Z (those born after 1998). They fill all the lecture rooms about IT & AI, occupy the career fair booths, and are all consumed with technology, the internet, and mobile phones. These are all strong indications that Generation Z is the most crucial generation for the technology industry. Whether it is the old or the new age of businesses, Generation Z is consumers, producers, entrepreneurs, and employees of technologists today and pretty soon will be employers as well.
In the last couple of years, we witnessed many companies talking about digital transformation – mobile-first, cloud-first, and everything digital. The digital era became popular in the previous two decades primarily because of the rise of social media and mobile, all thanks to Generation Y or millennials, those born in the early 80s. Enterprises today are run mainly by Generation Xers, those born between the early-mid 1960s to the early 1980s, or the Boomers, those born before the Xers. It remains to be seen if enterprise transformations will be quickly disrupted as the millennials are maturing in the field and the younger Generation Z are taking over the workplace. But we need not get carried away with this. We need the right amount of customer analytics, market studies with the explicit delineation between generations (Boomers, X, Y, & Z) in the researches’ demographics, and products and services targeting generation Z consumers.
So if I want to go back to the title of this article, “X is not Y and is surely not Z”, I would ask any prior-than-generation-Z readers and myself to: “as generations of A to Y” make sure that you think as Z because there is nothing after Z!
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