Enterprise 2.0: The Long Tail Within

The Long Tail market concept, (Chris Anderson), is now familiar to many observers of the Web’s impact on markets and commerce. From the point of view of external markets, it often represented like this.

The mass market culture has been fundamentally changed by the Web and the economies of the Long Tail. Companies often focus on bringing products and services to market with mass penetration being required to meet the demands of making a profit over the cost of sales and distribution. The Web has provided a channel that greatly expands exposure and lowers the cost of distribution and delivery. Many small niche markets are now more and more attractive to reach, and in aggregate are attractively profitable.

 The Web has also provided for broader social networks, and capacities for individuals to self-identify their interests and preferences and create new, marketable content themselves in what is called an “architecture of participation.”

However,

within the enterprise, there exists an untapped Long Tail.

  Companies focus on strategic plans and annual business plans – identifying the resources and organizational piorities that need to be devoted and aligned to achieve business results. Those piorities are likely focused on the front, large end of the tail and as such are high cost transactions. While focus and alignment are important, it can also diminish the opportunity for innovation and ideas that might be slightly off-topic to high level priorities, but nonetheless can alone or in aggregate yield productive ideas, streamlined or new economies in business process enhancements,  or better customer engagement.

I recently re-read an article from the July-August 2005 Harvard Business Review, an issue dedicated to and titled The High Performance Organization. In the article entitled Collaboration Rules, Philip Evans and Bob Wolf postulate that extraordinary results from collaborative teams can be more the norm than out-of-the-ordinary, or in the realm of hyper-achievers only.

When collaboration is fostered by both access to simple, adaptable tools and technologies, and a cultural and management approach that supports collaborative work styles, productive ideas and work habits can flourish.

A collaborative environment is one that fosters lots of “cheap, plentiful transactions,” of ideas, innovative ad hoc projects, or simply accelerate every-day project work.

Evans and Wolf explore this notion in two case study examples as disparate as the Linux open source community, and Toyota.   They recommend the following collaboration guidelines to advance productive collaboration, rules that I've posted in a mind map format.  Like many powerful notions, these helpful "rules" are simple and direct, but perhaps not common enough.

   

 

Where collaborative Enterprise 2.0 tools and practices are used, both team members and managers can and must evolve to functioning in an increasingly networked and participative model, where some key people become hubs in a team, while others, especially managers, become links to wider networks of people and expertise.