The basic premise of the long tail is that there is an equal or perhaps larger market of those willing to buy unpopular items (or services) than all the people who buy the popular items. It goes against traditional wisdom of focusing on items that can be sold many times, as you may be missing an even larger opportunity in the long tail. Instead, the long tail theory is to sell a few things to a few people at a time, but repeat this many times over. Of course the kicker is that it only works in certain circumstances, such as online music sales. The important criteria include being able to store objects cheaply (works for digital content), and most importantly, owning the sales platform, like Amazon or iTunes.
Technology
information & communication technology
The Internet of Everyone
Technology will rapidly change, consolidate, and probably change again. – John Chambers
Stop chasing the latest technology wave. It’s much better to make sense of it while also watching for the next wave. These waves of technology will most likely come faster and faster with the Internet of Everything (IoE). Faster feedback loops will be built into all product development cycles. Cloud-based technologies will mean constant change, much of it not even seen by end-users. As a result, better ways to negotiate a connected world will have to be developed. These will have to be human-centric if we expect them to last. Processes, data, and things may be able to change quickly, but people do not. While they may be agile, adaptable, and flexible, people cannot get a new operating system and start working in a different way overnight.
People and the Wild Internet of Everything
“Cisco’s view is that IoE technically differs from the Internet of Things; IoT is composed of connected objects, while IoE encompasses the networks that must support all the data these objects generate and transmit. “Software by itself won’t get the job done,” Chambers said at Interop in October, arguing that IoE demands data center software and hardware that work in concert.” – Information Week
Software is part of the solution. Hardware is part of the solution. People are the other part. Humans can connect complex things together better than any software or hardware system. It remains that the only practical interface with complexity is the human brain. It’s why the Turing test, to the chagrin of technology marketers, has never been passed by a machine.
ESN as knowledge bridges
An effective suite of enterprise social tools can help organizations share knowledge, collaborate, and cooperate – connecting the work being done with the identification of new opportunities and ideas. In an age when everything is getting connected, it only makes sense to have platforms in place that enable faster feedback loops inside the organization in order to deal with connected customers, suppliers, partners, and competitors. It takes a networked organization, staffed by people with networked mindsets, to thrive in a networked economy.
Enterprise social networks (ESN) are growing in usage in most large organizations. More employees are sharing knowledge through activity streams on platforms by IBM, SAP, Jive, Yammer, and Socialcast, to name a few. But ESN can constrain what they are supposed to enhance. Due to the very personal and intimate nature of implicit knowledge, people will only freely share it if they feel they are in control. A single enterprise network does not provide much individual control.
21C Monopoly
The robber barons of the 21st century are the platform owners. They have combined the power of network effects with a 20th century corporate capitalist, winner-takes-all approach. Amazon is choking the book publishing industry, Google is dominating advertising, and telecommunications companies are using their control of the pipes to directly compete with service providers. Now Uber is going after the taxi and car rental industries, getting to be larger than established rental car brands, with none of the overhead. All of these companies provide initially good services to customers. But over time their monopolistic tendencies kill competition and the entire ecosystem of innovation.
Mastering the Internet of Everything
In a recent interview, John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, stated that the major hurdle for the Internet of Everything is the underlying architecture or it will not happen, as too much effort will have to be spent on systems integration. As with most technical hurdles, this will likely be addressed, sooner or later.
Many people are just figuring out Web 1.0, mastering their web browsers, email and the like. Others are getting into Web 2.0, using social media to connect to people and join communities of practice. And now along comes the internet of everything (IoE). How will we be able to master this new network paradigm, or will it master us?
Peering deeply into collaboration
Dion Hinchcliffe recently took a look at the evolution of workplace collaboration technologies and the move toward data-driven control by organizational leadership.
But, as Constellation analyst Alan Lepovsky recently observed to me and I’ve had CIOs tell me on several occasions, the real play is the ability to peer deeply using machine learning into this collective intelligence to make better decisions based on ground truth that comes from what the organization as a whole actually knows. Essentially, it’s applying IBM’s Watson-style machine learning to the full collaborative output of your organization. – Dion Hinchcliffe , ZDNet
Dion concludes, “I predict that the digital organization of tomorrow will make the fullest of its most important information assets, especially the full measure of digital knowledge of its workers”. Is this the future? As minions scurry about, leaving traces of their collaboration and knowledge-sharing, managers will be able to see the whole picture and make informed decisions. This future reminds me of F.W. Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911).
Learning is Connecting
“Education over the Internet is going to be so big it is going to make email usage look like a rounding error.” – John Chambers 1999
Cisco’s CEO, John Chambers, was right, but not the way most people understood it at the time. As everything gets connected, we have to re-think our ideas about education and training. While education over the internet may not be as pervasive as email today, learning over the internet is massive. Learning is happening on every social media platform. It’s just not being controlled by educators and trainers. For example, there are how-to videos on YouTube, learning-oriented chats on Twitter, study groups on Facebook, and professional communities on LinkedIn. Google Plus may soon become the biggest social learning platform, as it integrates with collaborative documents, and real-time video Hangouts that can automatically be recorded and made available via YouTube.
A beacon of light
“Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.” —Anne Lamott
When Christopher Mackay and I started talking about my new website design we first discussed what my business means. I mentioned that clarity was important to my clients and that often I engage them when they are in a chaotic state where it is not certain what the outcomes will be.
I have learned over the years to be comfortable in not knowing what will happen and not having all the answers at the onset. As Chris and I talked, the idea of the lighthouse emerged. It is not just a beacon of light but a landmark and a place of departure. Living in Atlantic Canada, the lighthouse is a common, though vanishing, symbol of the region.
The lighthouse in my new website design is local. It is at Cape Jourimain, not far from where I live and work. In this new network era of perpetual Beta, it is good to stay grounded. Ken Homer has described this blog as “a beacon of light in the dark landscape of organizational learning”, so it just seemed fitting.
Site Redesign
If this site is popular, it is because of the content, not the design. I have not put much effort into the design and visual art is definitely not one of my skills. For the most part I have just used templates or very simple layouts. Here are some of the iterations through time.
