Is it the CIO’s role to manage technology or to manage how technology is used within the enterprise? Another jawbreaker is whether CIOs want to innovate, lead or follow with IT? While it is hard to look into the future, there are definitely some global forces that will forever change the face of IT. We have already made reference to these forces by coining the term 1.0 thinking.
The IT 1.0 thinking advocates the consumerization and commoditization of IT. Trends like Business Process and IT sourcing are unstoppable. Although there will still be a demographic shift when it comes to off-shoring locations. India already has difficulties finding the adequate IT skills in the market but once we master the language barriers, China and company are likely to be our next service and solutions provider.
The world is our cloud
We do not see any harm in the IT 1.0 thinking but this means that - as a CIO - you will get stuck somewhere along the fusion journey. In today’s tech world, vision become reality sooner than we might think:
Extremely powerful multi-core and hybrid processors will bring a new generation of mobile platforms. Your next PDA or smartphone is already the desktop’s next of kin and pushes the limits of ubiquitous computing and mobility.
The world is becoming increasingly digitized and virtualized: there will be virtual servers farms, mashups, cloud platforms and a thinking web. SaaS is only the first of many fusion experiments to happen between the web, the cloud, infrastructure, and applications
So how can the CIO make a difference with technology you might wonder. Perhaps it will be in the long tail of Software… Chris Anderson's book on "the business of selling more of less" has fundamentally changed people's thinking on current market economics in the perspective of modern day technology and the Internet.
The long tail
In essence the Long Tail is about finding the niches: it is why iTunes, Netflix and Amazon rank first when it comes to selection and inventory thus leaving their brick & mortar counterparts far behind. 
Long tailers sell niche products to a large population of customers by leveraging their existing online platforms. In the long tail model, you generate your profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The group of persons that buy niche products is the customer demographic called the Long Tail. The extra costs of distribution, warehousing or stocking these items remain negligible compared to the potential growth effect. The Long tail can be visualized by means of the power law distribution curve as shown above.
The driving forces behind the Long Tail of Enterprise IT
In order to fully grasp the concept of the Long tail of software, you need to understand the four driving forces behind the long tail.
1. Democratization of hardware and software:
Product creation is put into the hands of everyone thanks to cheap technology, virtual communities and open source platforms. This democratization is one of the driving forces behind the co-creation concept in the Long Tail.
2. Aggregated Distribution model:
Aggregators implement a Distribution 2.0 model that pull "products" together. Solutions are built under the form of connectors and allow for easy integration with any other platform. Distribution 2.0 formalizes the social thinking of these new distributors… the more channels you can tap into, the more chance of generating business and trafic.
3. Connecting Supply And Demand through hyperpersonalization
Extended and rich searching functionality which allows easy linking , connecting, authoring and extending. Anderson refers to this as “Filters” but it can also be seen as your own hyperpersonalized search platform. Search Engine Optimization will be a converging factor between technology and the academic world of semantics.
4. Reciprocity 2.0
In today’s technology world, there seems to be an enormous upsurge of socialism. New business models such as the open software operating models find their way into the traditional market space. Contribution in the IT 2.0 thinking equation is highly valued and stands for profit sharing and bringing new revenue models to life. Free for the consumers means finding new ways of monetizing innovations and coming up with advertising 2.0 models which the literature refers to as Democratizing Monetization.
Enterprise 2.0 in an IT 2.0 vision.
As a CIO, you now have to find your own long tail market within the enterprise - don’t focus on the head part of your technology capabilities. This is where you will find the software vendors, suppliers, integrators.
The mission of your IT department should not be building mainstream applications that are “freely” available in the market. Don’t go for the Cathedral but for the Bazaar approach. IT 2.0 will be about focusing on niche technology such as delivering specialized business solutions that are interesting to only a small number of people.
IT will prove its value when it can implement enterprise portals which serve as a starting point for mining and harvesting the collective intelligence in the enterprise, aggregation and creating virtual knowledge communities. The long Tail of Enterprise IT in this perspective is closely intertwined with the concept of Enterprise 2.0. With Enterprise 2.0, IT will be able to connect the crowds in the enterprise. These crowds can be customers, users, business lines, management.
Enterprise 2.0 or the collaborative enterprise model has the potential to push innovation one step further as it will accommodate peer-to-peer collaboration groups that work together on the R&D of new products and services. Enterprise 2.0 is all about co-creation, personalization and openness.
Enterprise 2.0 also allows for the crowdsourcing model, in which a company outsources work to a large group of market players or users using a collaborative online platform.
The long tail of enterprise IT is to focus on the business and its multiple processes. Typically, enterprise processes are usually highly customized and proprietary. Those business processes are either unique or are common to large numbers of very small users or client bases and therefore not traditionally worth the effort to invest in.
Infrastructure, ERP and CRM system could be considered as the head of the Long Tail of software: they are fixed, have a stable feature set, are architected, permanent, monolithic, generic and targeted at large user communities.

The true value and potential of IT-enabled innovation lies in the tail of Enterprise IT: Business solutions that are quickly customizable, evolved, disposable, aggregated, open and are provided to small user basis under the form of simple and intuitive web APIs.
Users become co-creators thanks to evolved production tools and they will want to share their knowledge with the crowds.
In the long tall of Enterprise IT, the cost of making IT will be minimal thanks to co-creation and loosely coupling capabilities of the enterprise IT platform. This will be an evolved version of today’s Service Oriented Architecture and serves as a shared platform that provides all sorts of development, stocking (infrastructure), inventory (services), quality and distribution features that keep incremental marketing costs to an absolute minimum.
“And this is where Enterprise 2.0 platforms have such an interesting story. Because they are highly democratic and egalitarian; anyone can deploy these tools, anyone can quickly learn to use and benefit from them, and they can be used to communicate and collaborate openly with anyone else inside (and often outside) the organization, are inherently viral, they literally tear down the barriers that would normally impede their forward movement and adoption inside the organization…” Dion Hinchcliffe in his blog on ZDNET.
The IT 1.0 thinking advocates the consumerization and commoditization of IT. Trends like Business Process and IT sourcing are unstoppable. Although there will still be a demographic shift when it comes to off-shoring locations. India already has difficulties finding the adequate IT skills in the market but once we master the language barriers, China and company are likely to be our next service and solutions provider.
The world is our cloud
We do not see any harm in the IT 1.0 thinking but this means that - as a CIO - you will get stuck somewhere along the fusion journey. In today’s tech world, vision become reality sooner than we might think:
Extremely powerful multi-core and hybrid processors will bring a new generation of mobile platforms. Your next PDA or smartphone is already the desktop’s next of kin and pushes the limits of ubiquitous computing and mobility.
The world is becoming increasingly digitized and virtualized: there will be virtual servers farms, mashups, cloud platforms and a thinking web. SaaS is only the first of many fusion experiments to happen between the web, the cloud, infrastructure, and applications
So how can the CIO make a difference with technology you might wonder. Perhaps it will be in the long tail of Software… Chris Anderson's book on "the business of selling more of less" has fundamentally changed people's thinking on current market economics in the perspective of modern day technology and the Internet.
The long tail
In essence the Long Tail is about finding the niches: it is why iTunes, Netflix and Amazon rank first when it comes to selection and inventory thus leaving their brick & mortar counterparts far behind. Long tailers sell niche products to a large population of customers by leveraging their existing online platforms. In the long tail model, you generate your profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The group of persons that buy niche products is the customer demographic called the Long Tail. The extra costs of distribution, warehousing or stocking these items remain negligible compared to the potential growth effect. The Long tail can be visualized by means of the power law distribution curve as shown above.
The driving forces behind the Long Tail of Enterprise IT
In order to fully grasp the concept of the Long tail of software, you need to understand the four driving forces behind the long tail.
1. Democratization of hardware and software:
Product creation is put into the hands of everyone thanks to cheap technology, virtual communities and open source platforms. This democratization is one of the driving forces behind the co-creation concept in the Long Tail.
2. Aggregated Distribution model:
Aggregators implement a Distribution 2.0 model that pull "products" together. Solutions are built under the form of connectors and allow for easy integration with any other platform. Distribution 2.0 formalizes the social thinking of these new distributors… the more channels you can tap into, the more chance of generating business and trafic.
3. Connecting Supply And Demand through hyperpersonalization
Extended and rich searching functionality which allows easy linking , connecting, authoring and extending. Anderson refers to this as “Filters” but it can also be seen as your own hyperpersonalized search platform. Search Engine Optimization will be a converging factor between technology and the academic world of semantics.
4. Reciprocity 2.0
In today’s technology world, there seems to be an enormous upsurge of socialism. New business models such as the open software operating models find their way into the traditional market space. Contribution in the IT 2.0 thinking equation is highly valued and stands for profit sharing and bringing new revenue models to life. Free for the consumers means finding new ways of monetizing innovations and coming up with advertising 2.0 models which the literature refers to as Democratizing Monetization.
Enterprise 2.0 in an IT 2.0 vision.
As a CIO, you now have to find your own long tail market within the enterprise - don’t focus on the head part of your technology capabilities. This is where you will find the software vendors, suppliers, integrators.
The mission of your IT department should not be building mainstream applications that are “freely” available in the market. Don’t go for the Cathedral but for the Bazaar approach. IT 2.0 will be about focusing on niche technology such as delivering specialized business solutions that are interesting to only a small number of people.
IT will prove its value when it can implement enterprise portals which serve as a starting point for mining and harvesting the collective intelligence in the enterprise, aggregation and creating virtual knowledge communities. The long Tail of Enterprise IT in this perspective is closely intertwined with the concept of Enterprise 2.0. With Enterprise 2.0, IT will be able to connect the crowds in the enterprise. These crowds can be customers, users, business lines, management.
Enterprise 2.0 or the collaborative enterprise model has the potential to push innovation one step further as it will accommodate peer-to-peer collaboration groups that work together on the R&D of new products and services. Enterprise 2.0 is all about co-creation, personalization and openness.
Enterprise 2.0 also allows for the crowdsourcing model, in which a company outsources work to a large group of market players or users using a collaborative online platform.
The long tail of enterprise IT is to focus on the business and its multiple processes. Typically, enterprise processes are usually highly customized and proprietary. Those business processes are either unique or are common to large numbers of very small users or client bases and therefore not traditionally worth the effort to invest in.
Infrastructure, ERP and CRM system could be considered as the head of the Long Tail of software: they are fixed, have a stable feature set, are architected, permanent, monolithic, generic and targeted at large user communities.

The true value and potential of IT-enabled innovation lies in the tail of Enterprise IT: Business solutions that are quickly customizable, evolved, disposable, aggregated, open and are provided to small user basis under the form of simple and intuitive web APIs.
Users become co-creators thanks to evolved production tools and they will want to share their knowledge with the crowds.
In the long tall of Enterprise IT, the cost of making IT will be minimal thanks to co-creation and loosely coupling capabilities of the enterprise IT platform. This will be an evolved version of today’s Service Oriented Architecture and serves as a shared platform that provides all sorts of development, stocking (infrastructure), inventory (services), quality and distribution features that keep incremental marketing costs to an absolute minimum.
“And this is where Enterprise 2.0 platforms have such an interesting story. Because they are highly democratic and egalitarian; anyone can deploy these tools, anyone can quickly learn to use and benefit from them, and they can be used to communicate and collaborate openly with anyone else inside (and often outside) the organization, are inherently viral, they literally tear down the barriers that would normally impede their forward movement and adoption inside the organization…” Dion Hinchcliffe in his blog on ZDNET.