MY MOTHER works for a public sector bank. She narrated this incident to me about six years ago, when their branch was getting computerised. One of their senior employees had to learn to work on the computer. It was quite a culture shock for him. One fine day he called my mother to ask about a prompt that he saw on the computer screen. All he could make of it was that there was something on the computer screen that did not allow him to work.

It turned out that the computer wanted a password. The poor guy did not even know what a password was and mistook it for a ‘passport’. As luck would have it, he did not even have a passport – so he was even more perplexed. Mustering up courage, he asked my mother, “Madam, I do not have a passport; would it work if I show it my driving license?”

Now, that is clearly a problem with training. The generation gap between young employees, many of whom are natives of the digital age, and those who have been required to learn computers in the twilight of their working life is huge. But, the times are changing fast.

Not being on Facebook is just so stone-age now. If your friends say that they are not on Facebook, youngsters are going to give them strange looks. Not only is the younger generation getting on Facebook themselves, they are getting their parents involved too. And those parents, mind you, are the employees who work in your organisation.

Employees, for whom the idea of a computer was that of an office machine till a few years ago, are now getting a taste of the fun things a computer can do. Your employees are no more scared of computers.

Shouldn’t this make your job easier? At least you will not have to teach your employees about logins and passwords.

On that front, probably yes – but this scenario throws a different kind of challenge. Since most of these employees would already be using web services like Google and Facebook, their expectation of the systems that they are working on have also been changed.

To give you an example, Google recently launched a search service called ‘Google Instant’. Incorporated in Google search itself, it gives you search results as you type in the search box. You do not even need to hit enter. Compare this with the search feature in your CRM – if your systems are taking more than a couple of seconds to give results, you have fallen behind your business users' expectations.

So, believe it or not, being IT leaders you are competing with the likes of Google. You are pitched against companies who spend millions of dollars on their service levels and the quality of their interface. And, the best part is that these companies offer their services for free. Do not be surprised if you are asked this question by your management – if they can offer it for free, why can you not do even half of it after spending so much money?

THE AUTHOR IS Executive Editor, CTO Forum