Transfering the Tail

I just started reading The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. To sum it up: I like it so far. It’s an easy but very interesting read. As you might know I’m especially interested in transfering consumer innovations into corporate settings.

Well, as we know the Long Tail of the media and entertainment industry favors the economics (t d f) of niche markets (t d f) over the top sellers that dominated most of the 20th century’s business models and culture. In a universe of abundance we don’t need the filters of the global Top Ten or Bestellers. Instead we are able to choose those little niche products, goods, and services that really interest us – that said we need not to forget that we need another breed of filter (t d f)s as well.

And best of all that’s the business model too: If you are able to meet the demand with supplying choices than you win and your customers win too. You just need to generate the demand and support the supply.

Now how would that apply to corporate communication, innovation, and knowledge-mangement (t d f)?

Imagine – in a business/organisation that deals mostly with exceptions and seldom with routine – that the entire stock of data. information, knowledge, conversations, customer feedback gets atomized. On first sight that’s the nightmare of every CIO (t d f) and CEO. Years and billions were spent on centralizing data, information, and knowledge. Out of that central repository the top ten documents, manuals, use cases etc. are available to all the fellow workers via the corporate intranet. A classic hit economy that could be represented with the head of a curve that mainly consists of a tail. But his tail is seen as not-essential enough to support it explicitly. Not-essential because in a command-and-control environment only the tip of the iceberg is visible and therefore supported. On the other hand we know that the daily business is done by getting in contact with those people, objects, and data that reside in the long tail of the information business.

Wouldn’t it be very helpful to set the tail free by providing tools and even more important a culture that helps – I’m quoting:

Make it, get it out there, and help find it. (Chris Anderson, The Long Tail (t d f), p52)