Tech Populism is a major force that's changing the way we work. Behind the walls of SMBs and enterprises are empowered employees who increasingly make individual choices about the technologies that they use to get their jobs done. With the growing ubiquity of technology in the workplace (smartphones, other mobile devices, and PCs) individual workers are often making decisions for themselves. The opportunity for tech strategists lies in addressing portfolio strategy as well as go-to-market strategy to address this rising tide of new buyers.

To explore Tech Populism, Forrester is currently designing its upcoming Workforce Forrsights Survey to be fielded to 5,000 employees in the US, Canada, France, the UK, and Germany who work at businesses across a range of industries and company sizes. Our target respondents use a smartphone or computer at least 1 hour per day at work.

The Workforce Forrsights Survey will answer questions about how employees:

  • Leverage personal devices and software/services in their jobs.
  • Utilize other tools such as social networking to collaborate with coworkers, clients, and prospects.
  • Adopt applications and online tools to do their jobs (such as add on applications, wikis, and mobile applications).
  • View their IT departments — are they a resource or only an impediment?
  • Influence the adoption of new technologies by their company.
  • Learn about new technologies to adopt for work — not sure if this will covered or not, but this sort of gets at the marketing piece.. where are people learning about these technologies?

Some of them are “home” devices, but others may come from work-related blogs, coworkers, or even tech-savvy IT friends.As part of the design process, we are looking for your input on the questions that are most important to you. As technology industry strategists, what do you need to know about these empowered employees?

Specifically:

  • What topic areas are we missing?
  • What are the most important demographics to capture in order to create actionable data segmentations for you?
  • What are the most important game-changing technologies to ask about?


 Which of the following potential insights is most important to uncover?

  • Where employees fall on a tech optimism scale
  • Why employees are leapfrogging over IT
  • How much an employee’s consumer life influences their use of technology at work
  • How employees influence IT

We’re excited to hear your suggested improvements, new topic areas, and even specific questions right here in the blog comments. We'll be locking down themes by June 25, 2010 and expect final data in late August. I will share selected results of the Workforce research through this blog. If you would like more information about becoming a charter client of Workforce Forrsights, please contact myself or businessdatarequest@forrester.com.