Gen ‘C’ is a new driver for excellence in ICT

Today’s ICT consumers come from different generations, say X, Y or Z. Yet, convergence seems to have created many commonalities for them. Thanks to the mobile revolution, they are all increasingly connected, which means that communication is an instant and real-time realization for them.

They demand an increasingly complex and changing mix of connectivity, communication, content, computing, and what not…there are just too many ‘C’s involved here. Incidentally, at a recent analyst meet that I attended, well known industry veteran C.P. Gurnani aptly referred to it as the generation C.

Contrary to early days of ICT, when hi-tech would trickle down from business users to consumers, today the consumer is demanding and driving tech at a breakneck speed. As Gurnani pointed out, the tech experience at home often surpasses the tech experience at workplaces.

Examples could be many. These would include the iPhones, iPads and GalaxyTabs and also the Facebooks and YouTubes and so on. And then there are hundreds of thousands of apps that consumers can access using app stores, where the delivery paradigm has resembled that of the “cloud” for quite some time. Some recent cloud-related announcements, including Apple’s iCloud, certainly help to make the offerings more attractive, of course because of increased maturity and sophistication. The “cloud” looks well poised to address the evolving needs of Gen C.

What does that mean? Well, most significantly, there is an opportunity the ICT industry stakeholders to adapt and port more and more consumer-facing applications into the enterprise environment. While some work has already happened on that, with enterprise-grade social networking applications being among the most notable examples, the untapped opportunities would be many more.

Gen C is in the workplace too and there is an opportunity to make their ICT experience at least as rich and evolved, if not more, as in their personal lives. One way to address this is by way of apps. Another simple yet effective way of doing this is through devices. Some businesses globally are already at various stages of implementing “bring your own device” policies and the results have been encouraging, as that helps meet device-related part of ICT experience needs of users.

There would be challenges and issues to overcome, ranging from data security to hardware and software compatibility, but in the challenges lie opportunities for ICT stakeholders. For businesses, the benefits could come in the form of improved employee satisfaction, retention and productivity, among other things.