Two posts caught my eye last night - 5 questions a teenage kid might ask if starting work at your business today by Mike Sarokin on the EDS blog and Vinnie Mirchandarni’s follow up here. As the parent of a college student myself I had to chime in.

It seems to me that not only are the kinds of basic technology questions that Mike and Vinnie likely to be top of mind when today’s teenagers become your workforce, they are also going to have different expectations. They will wonder why they have to approve things using a mindless check list when the computer could do that or them. They will wonder they cannot change the way their systems impact their customers quickly and easily. They will refuse to spend time reviewing things for decisions that seem like they could be automated. They are not going to read all the notes written down by your retiring experts, they are going to expect the systems to handle it. They expect technology to work for them and to be flexible. They are not going to like what they find in most corporate information systems.

Enterprise decision management, EDM, is relevant here as it helps capture knowledge in an actionable form, automates repeatable decisions and makes dumb systems “smarter”. Today’s teenagers are used to games with computer players that are pretty darned smart. They will expect their corporate systems to be smart too.