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268 Chapter 8

6. Characterize the major groupware tools and explain how they would be imple-
mented within an organization.
7. Sketch out the major components of a knowledge repository and explain how
organizations and organizational users would make optimal use of one.
8. Describe how e-learning and knowledge management intersect and in which ways
they differ.
9. Identify emerging technologies and describe how they may be applied in a KM
context.
10. Compare and contrast the skill set and technology expectations of the baby
boomer and the millennial generations.

Introduction

Technology is a moving target as new tools are being continuously developed and
adopted to varying degrees by users. Knowledge management has an added complica-
tion in that there is no single tool that will cover all the bases. A suite or toolkit of
technologies, applications, and infrastructures are required in order to address all
phases involved in capturing, coding, sharing, disseminating, applying, and reusing
knowledge. Yet another variable to further complicate the situation is that the users
themselves are continuously changing. While baby boomers have certain preferences,
such as preferring the phone to e-mail or meeting face to face, as well as certain
expectations of technology (e.g., they are quite tolerant of errors, willing to wait, and
quite accepting of asynchronous communications), the same cannot be said of the
new millennial generation ( Eisner 2005 ; Raines 2003 ).
The millennial generation is also referred to as the net generation (Tapscott,) or the
Y generation as it comes after generation X. The baby boomers are generally defi ned
as those born after World War II in the years between 1945 and 1965. Generation X
refers to those born between 1966 and 1980, while the Y generation refers to those
born between 1980 and the year 2000. Perhaps the best way to characterize generation
Y or the millennials is that they were the fi rst to grow up with television and the
Internet. Throughout all three waves, there has been a wide range of innovations and
new tools, both for public consumption and for the workplace. The millennials tend
to have high expectations of the workplace precisely because they are such avid users
of real-time tools in their personal lives. The generational differences thus introduce
an added level of complexity to the KM world.