Something that has caught my eye lately in the business press is a focus on employee empowerment and the idea that big ideas can come from anywhere within an organization — if each employee feels like he/she is supported in breaking down traditional barriers.

Gone are the days when a management structure centralized decision making at the top of the organization and messages traveled linearly to the “worker bees” at the bottom.  No longer is it possible to be a high-functioning company if information is held tightly within silos by a select few.  Today’s leading companies need to foster an environment where information is freely shared and everyone feels like he/she can do what is necessary to advance the mission of the company, make customers happy, and ultimately become more profitable.

Smart companies are implementing tools for employees to use in this pursuit.  These tools sound a lot like tools that people use in their personal lives such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Wikipedia, etc.  An HBR piece today highlights this rather well.  Read more at this link: Moving from Top-Down to All-In – Suzanne Vickberg – The Conversation – Harvard Business Review.

Take for example, British telecommunications giant BT. They started to encourage participation with an experimental wiki called BTpedia, designed to facilitate information sharing across the company. On its heels they launched a second experiment that introduced blogging, and a third that created a small-scale social network.These ad hoc efforts then evolved into a robust internal social network, called My BT, that lets individuals customize their own pages.

My BT provides one-stop shopping to access all the content employees have posted on BTpedia, in blogs, and elsewhere, and also shows what other colleagues in someone’s network are up to. Involving people through new mediums has been a big hit with BT’s people for sure, but the company is seeing an even bigger payoff from their investment. Richard Dennison, principal business partner at BT, described it to us like this, “I don’t think that you can have an innovative company unless every single employee thinks they can make a difference to the organization. These tools are a key enabler for people to think they can make a difference.”

Also linked in the aforementioned HBR post is a related piece about the move from a “ladder” structure to a “lattice” structure in successful organizations.  Both of these are great reads about where strategic management is heading and the power that can come from inclusion rather than tight control.

For a more in-depth examination of this topic, I highly recommend reading Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler, a book that was released in September.  It highlights this same phenomenon of information sharing and decentralized structures that the authors predict will be the wave of the future.  They argue that since customers are more empowered (consider the information consumers have now about nearly any product as compared to 20 years ago) that companies need to be as well.  For example, Best Buy is featured extensively in the book for their Twelpforce concept that has turned customer service into a proactive task and customer difficulty into an opportunity instead of a curse.

I loved reading this book but I’m guessing the challenge will be to get buy-in from the people that need to make the biggest changes: those entrenched in the IT department.  In my experience, IT policies can be terribly restrictive and I’m not sure how to get the ideas presented in Empowered into the hands of the people that need to change direction since, in a way, doing so is a threat to their existence.

How many companies block access to sites like Youtube, Flickr, Twitter, etc. in the name of security?  Is it really computer security or job security that is the focus here I wonder?  Lots of things that IT does today could be done by the former “worker bees” in the future and those IT folks that are not flexible will hold on until the bitter end because their lack of flexibility is exactly what spells doom for their employment future.

The opportunity, however, exists for those that are flexible (or are willing to become flexible) to set a new path for IT by becoming a partner to business units rather than performing the traditional gatekeeper role they maintain today.  Companies with management within IT and elsewhere that manage to realize this before the competition does will have a distinct competitive advantage.  In fact, those inflexible IT employees may soon find that they company the work for no longer exists.  Who is empowered then?