We inhabit an age in which empowering technology is readily available first to individuals, not institutions. Consumers and employees will always get the new good stuff first. And it will always be so. The economics of technology investment seal that deal. The consumer market's bigger and easier to get started in.
In this empowered era, smart mobile devices, social technology, pervasive video, and cloud computing are the anchor tenants of the new technology platform. These technologies are available to every consumer and employee, even yours. The question is what to do about it? Two things:
- Because customers can hijack your brand (consumers in the US make 500 billion impressions on each other online every year), you have to use empower your customers with better information than they can get from their networks. You have to honor your customers as a marketing channel.
- Because employees have ready access to technology to improve their working lives, you have to give employees permission -- and protection -- to adpt these technologies. You have to honor employees' use of consumer technology as a source of incremental and sometimes breakthrough innovation.
It's Time For A Whole-Company Response
So far, companies have been mostly been reacting to the demands that new technology places on the firm when the pressure gets too high. Marketing builds a community site and Facebook page. IT considers a bring-your-own smartphone policy. Learning and development experiments with video training. Developers build apps using cloud technology.
These reactions are necessary, but not sufficient. Instead, we need to bring marketing, IT, and customer services together to plan and execute the new customer engagement model. We need to bring IT, HR, legal, and business together to turn consumerization from IT threat to business opportunity.
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4th November 2010, 08:47 AM
Welcome To The Empowered Era 
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