It’s fashionable when talking about the ways different generations use computers to split users into two groups – the digital natives and digital immigrants.
Born after 1990, digital natives are believed to have an intuitive understanding of digital technologies born from never having known a world without computers.
Digital immigrants on the other hand are from an era where computers were not common outside big corporations and government departments, so most people born before 1990 had to learn to use computers.
like many similar demographic divides, the line between digital immigrants and natives is contentious and probably more unhelpful than useful.
A fascinating question though is whether corporations can be digital natives and immigrants.
One of the challenges for older corporations, the corporate digital immigrants, are the legacy business systems that have their roots in the pre-digital era. A good example of this is United Airlines which struggles under inflexible management and old aircraft which can’t provide the levels of service and reliability expected by modern customers.
A similar problem faces retailers who’ve haven’t invested in modern logistics, point of sale and online commerce systems – these businesses simply cannot compete with those who have up to date technology.
Part of this problem comes from the difficulties in upgrading both technology and management systems in complex organisations, it’s not an easy task and the cost of failure is high so it’s understandable that many businesses don’t attempt it.
In the meantime there’s the corporate digital immigrants, the more recently founded businesses that aren’t weighed down by legacy management and technology.
The problem for the legacy businesses is the digitally native companies are able to take advantage of cheap and powerful tools that older organisations struggle to integrate into their operations.
So the digital native-immigrant divide could be actually a business problem rather than one of how different generations discovered computers.