Forrester will publish the book, Empowered, in September, co-authored by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler, its sequel to Groundswell.  Groundswell was about social technologies empowering consumers, the new book demonstrates how empowered customers place demands on companies, and how it takes empowered employees (refered to as HEROes – highly empowered and resourceful operatives) to meet their demands. In this book, the authors tell the stories of some of these HEROes, like Mark Betka at the US State Department, the Twelpforce team at Best Buy, and the Rob Sharpe, who transformed sales training at Black & Decker with his own internal YouTube.

I got a preview of the approach as Forrester shared a review copy of the report, The HERO Index: Finding Empowered Employees by Ted Schadler and Josh Bernoff.  Here is apartial quote form the summary. “The HERO Index is a new tool we have developed to measure just how empowered and resourceful your own employees are. Our data reveals that some industries (like technology products and services) and job descriptions (like marketing and nonretail sales) harbor more HEROes than others. Your new job is to find the HEROes in your organization and to encourage and support their innovative applications.”

I like this approach.  There has been too much effort to simplify jobs and automate processes. What first appealed to me about the early stages of knowledge management was the attempt to empower employees with the right information to excel at their jobs. The same opportunity was what re-energized me when enterprise 2.0 came along. To research this report, Forrester surveyed 4,364 US information workers — people who use computers or mobile devices in their jobs — in November 2009.

The reports points out that the same Web 2.0 technologies that empower customers are available to empowered employees in (I would add) enterprise 2.0. They then offer many cases of what I would call enterprise 2.0. For example, Sales trainer Rob Sharpe at Stanley Black & Decker created his own internal YouTube-type sites to share insights.  Employees working with clients can use can use cloud technologies to share project schedules or background materials.

These efforts are often light-weight from an IT perspective and are originated by people form the business units rather than IT.  In fact, they found that reveal that 39% of HEROes use productivity tools not provided by their IT departments.  These employees often do things at their own expense. For example, they found that 23% of HEROes use a smartphone for work and more than half of them — 12% — paid for it themselves. In addition, 13% pay for all or some of their monthly data plan.  They do this just toe enable them to do their job better. No wonder they should be considered heroes.

I am looking forward to this book. In the meanwhile the report if very useful to help you find HEROs in your organization, help then succeed and/or become a HERO yourself.