Managing the Web 2.0 workplace, and preparing for IT’s “third wave”: two of the latest must-reads for IT leaders.

Empowered: Unleash your employees, energize your customers, transform your business

Josh Bernoff & Ted Schadler

There’s a new breed of employee at large in the workforce, and management and IT need to get to grips with them quickly, argue Forrester Research’s Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler in this follow-up to 2008’s highly-influential Groundswell. Termed “HEROes” (highly empowered and resourceful operatives), they are non-IT knowledge workers who, thanks to the ubiquity of Web 2.0 technology, are “transforming the way companies operate [by] taking technology into their own hands and creating solutions to customer problems”. Given the right resources and direction, Bernoff and Schadler believe, these people can create enormous value and are already doing so at innovative companies such as Best Buy, Intel and Chubb.

However, harnessing the power of HEROes requires a huge amount of trust and openness from management and IT. The latter’s role, in particular, is critical and the book devotes several chapters to how IT can help optimise the organisation’s – frequently self-provisioned – technology while keeping everyone safe. “While HEROes’ technology ideas are customer focused, they aren’t always business ready. IT’s technology ideas are business ready but not always customer focused,” Bernoff and Schadler write. But when HEROes and IT work together, they argue, the partnership can be extraordinarily powerful.

Expertly written and packed with illuminating case studies, this book is every bit the equal of its predecessor, Groundswell. Read it before your competitors do.

See also our exclusive interview with Josh Bernoff.

The Learning Layer: Building the next level of intellect in your organization

Steven D Flinn

Not since the emergence of ecommerce a decade 
ago has IT truly mattered to most business executives 
in terms of its transformational potential. That is the provocative starting point for Steven Flinn’s The Learning Layer. But the former CIO and VP of strategy at Shell argues that business is about to be awakened from its long slumber by what amounts to “the third wave of IT”.

Following on from computing’s early years where the focus was on the speed at which data could be processed, and then the build-up of universal connectivity, comes “the era of adaptation” where systems will constantly be learning from their interactions with people (and other machines) and evolving accordingly. That environment will be underpinned by two mechanisms: fuzzy networks, which learn by weighting the value of each interaction, and the intellectual capital that is unleashed by Web 2.0.

The early shoots of the learning layer are already visible, Flinn says. On the internet, users already expect environments like Amazon and Google to adapt to their specific needs by recognising patterns of behaviour and generating recommendations and personalised search results. Over the next decade, that kind of IT will be part of the fabric of most enterprise systems, he argues.

The discussion here is unapologetically theoretical. Only at the end is there an outline of how different corporate functions will look when the learning layer is active. But the vision is compelling – even if CIOs may disagree that IT’s transformational powers only flower once a decade.