How Teenagers Are Helping Design Leading Edge Risk Management Software

Watching my kids play with their smart phones got me thinking about how they use ICT and how people will expect to use ICT to manage risk in the digital workplace. The most obvious feature is a lack of patience: points have to be made quickly or nobody will bother to read them (LOL). But if kids become interested, they expect to be able to search and find very specific answers to random questions in real time. Strikingly, they have little interest in privacy (either their own or anyone else’s); but they definitely expect any devices they use or access to not have any downtime.

Each of these teenagers customise what they use, how they use it, and develop their own profiles as members of their various digital communities. You could see these teenagers as flexible and nimble individualists or as flighty, superficial neophytes. However you choose to regard them, their way of doing things foreshadows some important changes in the workplace.

Let's take the use of ICT to manage risk as an example. Any teenager will tell you that although information accuracy is still quite important, speed is becoming relatively much more important. Good risk management is built on the systematic use of imagination. Complementary technology will enable good risk management, not straitjacket it. Breaking with tradition, the need is for systems to be able to change and move on rather than being built to last (more like a caravan and less like a cathedral). This means an open acknowledgement that it's not so much technology overload as “filter failure” that puts grit into the gearbox. Software that focuses on its clever technology and content rather than reducing information into useful knowledge misses the point. It won't be larger receptacles of data or faster storage that are needed, but good enough insight to improve the speed of taking better decisions.

So where will technology have to go to keep up with