Groundswell technologies — social, mobile, video, and cloud — put tremendous power in the hands of customers. Only empowered employees can respond at the speed of empowered customers — and they're often information workers outside of IT. We call these innovative information workers HEROes — highly empowered and resourceful operatives. 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.