Many of you have heard the term, Digital Native. It refers to the recent generations of people that have grown up in the digital era. They don’t know a world without the internet, social media, e-commerce, and other digital capabilities. For them, digital seems normal and the analog equivalents seem foreign.

Technically, I’m too old to be a Digital Native. I’m a young Gen-Xer. I grew up in the era of VHS tapes and MTV. The internet as we know it emerged as I was finishing high school. As you may expect, I was a very early adopter. I had my homepage on Angelfire and my email on Hotmail before Microsoft owned it.

That still doesn’t make me a Digital Native. That term applies to formative consumer experiences. I’ve recently thought about applying the concept to the professional world, which often operates at a different pace and varies by industry.

I’m doing this because I’ve recently realized that my professional experience is a bit uncommon. I’ll use this article to explain.

Digital Transformation

While the internet took the world by storm 25 years ago, the disruptive effect on traditional business is still unfolding. I remember when I first started seeing the term “Digital Transformation” everywhere in 2016 or 2017. I even wrote a ZoL article about it. In 2020, the pandemic created a new surge of Digital Transformation to decouple business activities from physical locations and processes.

This tells me that many, many businesses are still operating the old-fashioned way: through paper, wet signatures, snail mail, phone calls, and brick and mortar.

A Digital Native professional

Many tech leaders have been working on business digitization for decades. I realized that my formative professional years were spent in businesses that had already been digitized by the time I got there.

GMAC-RFC: I joined this mortgage securitization company in 1999. The company bought mortgages from brokers, bundled them, and sold them as securities on Wall Street. The buying of mortgages and selling of securities were 100% digital.

Everything flowed through the information systems and websites that we developed and hosted in our data centers. No technology? No company. When I blew up the data center in 2002, the whole company went offline along with it. Fortunately, we restored services after a few hours.

Several years later, the mortgage meltdown took that company out, and I had an opportunity to move to another digital business.

RCIS: I joined RCIS in 2007, a crop insurance company owned by Wells Fargo (now Zurich). By the time I joined, policy servicing, claims processing, and underwriting were already digital. Not everything was real-time and automated. We made significant advancements while I was there, but the paper process was already long gone.

The corporate headquarters reflected the focus on digitization. We had about 400 people that worked there. 300 of them were in IT.

After 16 years in digital financial services companies, I joined CHS in 2015. This was the first time in my career that I worked for a company that wasn’t already 100% digitized. That’s not because CHS was behind the times, but more of a function of what is normal in the agriculture and energy industries, and the physical nature of much of the work and product.

I often feel like an outsider in analog business. It seems odd to me that our business and many others still operate through paper, wet signatures, snail mail, phone calls, and brick and mortar. Digital solutions seem normal to me. The analog is unfamiliar, but I am learning more about it every day.

The advantage

For consumer technology, it’s self-evident that Digital Natives have an advantage. Since they grew up in the digital age, they learn and embrace new technology with ease. The non-Digital Natives may require special training or help. The Digital Natives are ready to go.

In the same way, my formative professional years were spent in digital companies. For me, electronic processes are normal. Data-informed decisions are normal. Engagement on LinkedIn and Twitter is normal. Reliance on business-critical technology is reasonable.

“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed” – William Gibson, novelist and cyberpunk fiction pioneer

My job as a technology leader is to evenly distribute the future that is already here. Rarely do I get the opportunity to work on never-before-seen technology. Mostly, I work to bring existing technology to bear in new applications and industries that have yet to be fully digitized.

As a Digital Native in my professional career, I find this task easier than most. Others rely on me to provide the vision forward.

What do you think about this concept of a Digital Native applied to formative professional experiences? Do you think it matters? What’s been your experience? Let me know in the comments.

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