The Long Tail - Overcoming the 80/20 Rule
Venture Blog has a very interesting note on the 80/20 rule based on an article from Wired.
The basic premise is that the 80/20 rule is dictated by physical constraints. Those constraints are removed when we move to alternate models enabled by the web. For example, Barnes & Nobles carries around 130,000 books based on what they believe will be the top selling books. On the other hand, 50% of Amazon's revenue comes books ranked lower than the top 130,000 books. Amazon does not have the same inventory constraints that Barnes & Nobles has and thus can carry many more books. Most of these don't sell many copies but each small sale adds up. This is the long tail.
The same can apply to business intelligence. The trend today is to provide users with pre-built reports. There are only so many pre-built reports that can be provided economically by an IT organization. On the other hand, BI tools such as Oracle Discoverer have evolved so that they are simple to learn and use while at the same time can be delivered over the web and managed centrally. I believe that we are at a point, where IT organizations should really consider empowering their end-users with more capabilities and thus serving the long tail.
The basic premise is that the 80/20 rule is dictated by physical constraints. Those constraints are removed when we move to alternate models enabled by the web. For example, Barnes & Nobles carries around 130,000 books based on what they believe will be the top selling books. On the other hand, 50% of Amazon's revenue comes books ranked lower than the top 130,000 books. Amazon does not have the same inventory constraints that Barnes & Nobles has and thus can carry many more books. Most of these don't sell many copies but each small sale adds up. This is the long tail.
The same can apply to business intelligence. The trend today is to provide users with pre-built reports. There are only so many pre-built reports that can be provided economically by an IT organization. On the other hand, BI tools such as Oracle Discoverer have evolved so that they are simple to learn and use while at the same time can be delivered over the web and managed centrally. I believe that we are at a point, where IT organizations should really consider empowering their end-users with more capabilities and thus serving the long tail.
posted by whizdog at 10:55 AM
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