Technology's Mass Appeal Changing Business Operations

Commercial real estate firms should brace themselves for the effects of technology populism–a trend defined by the proliferation of consumer devices, social networking tools and online collaboration services making their way into the workplace.

That’s the bottom line of a report from Cambridge, MA-based Forrester Research, which predicts technology populism will force information technology professionals in all sectors to reconsider how they provision and support collaborative software and services.

Technology populism springs from changing demographics and driven by “people’s needs to interact,” says Matthew Brown, principal analyst on the Forrester report. “Today’s organizations are increasingly dominated by Generation Xers and Millennials, a workforce that is adept at provisioning its own technology and one that is willing to shun traditional methods of communication. For many employees, the telephone and e-mail are being replaced by text messaging, instant messaging and mobile devices, such as iPhones and BlackBerrys, and social computing tools like Facebook and Wikipedia.”