The Long Tail (Part 1)

The concept of the Long Tail is one defined by Chris Anderson back in October 2004 in Wired Magazine. Over time different business, community groups, and individuals have applied that concept to their own situations. So what I am doing here is nothing new for the Long Tail – but is a new concept for SharePoint. I’ve been involved with countless SharePoint deployments into both large enterprises and SMB’s and without fail –successful deployments aim to solve one or two specific use cases (footnote). But before we get into the SharePoint bits – let’s talk about the Long Tail.

The Long Tail refers to a curve (see image 1) that starts with a high peak and falls off.

If we were talking about book sales at Amazon and the curve would represent books sales from the most popular to the most esoteric. So the peak might indicate the Oprah Book of the Month and the end of the tail might indicate The History of Locksmiths in Sweden. On a daily basis, sales at the end of the tail pail in comparison to those that Oprah’s recommends. But, if you take the total sales of the long tail and add them up – they make Amazon more money than the Oprah books. That’s the power of the Long Tail. Now, let’s apply this to SharePoint.

SharePoint usually comes into a business for 1-2 specific business cases and these cases are enough to justify the expense of SharePoint. But the reality is that there are many more opportunities where SharePoint can make an impact on the business and if you would take all of these opportunities and add them up and enable your employees to create the required solutions – they more than justify SharePoint. The hard part is educating your employees how to identify business cases and how to apply SharePoint to them. We will go into this in greater detail in the next post.

Now the business cases I am referring to are generally smaller and seemingly inconsequential. They are things like:

• How one department receives work from other departments
• How a team manages their employee’s calendar
• How teams collaborate
• How information is found (yes, findability matters)
  

Now as opportunities like these are folded into SharePoint and the teams that use them willingly adopt them – teams work together better and more efficiently. But as more and more data is moved into a single repository – there are additional rewards that can be gleaned by the business… but more about that in a later post.

So that’s what we’re going to be reviewing through this series of posts – how to get the rewards from the Long Tail out of SharePoint.

In the next post: I will identify the magic formula for success with SharePoint.