It’s tempting to see the gulf that has grown up between admins and users in some organisations as a culture clash of two age groups, the LAN Generation (let’s call them ‘Generation X’ because it conveniently references people born in the 1960s) and the younger Generation Y that has been the subject of this feature.

This would be a mistake although it does neatly outline the different attitude of workers who grew up with the PC and Internet in the 1980s and 1990s and for whom the challenge was simple: get things to work. Years on, for Generation Y the challenge is less a technical one than a social one: how to change the way things work.

Age, then, is better seen as a motif for divisions that grow up in all organisations between hierarchies, between those whose job it is to manage and those who carry out its most basic functions and look for as many short cuts as possible.


What the emergence of Generation Tech suggests is that technology has changed in ways that offer huge benefits and the best response is to adapt rather than deny, and to involve workers in choosing and developing applications rather than turning them into slaves to the UAC prompt and login box.

Applications are not the enemy and neither are the people who use (or want to use) them. They are the managers of tomorrow and future of all organisations that want to stick around.