Your customers and your employees have more power than ever before. Mobile, social, video, and cloud technologies give individuals tremendous access to information and resources. To succeed in an era of empowered customers, you must empower employees to solve customer and business problems. First, build bridges to your marketing and customer service teams to help these teams scale up new customer solutions. Then give employees the safety net and permission to be your greatest source of innovation and breakthrough ideas. You have an opportunity to reinvent yourself and the role of IT to become the chief technology advisor and enabler of empowered initiatives. Seize the opportunity.