The definitive book on the new media economy has to be Chris Anderson's The Long Tail. It offers a simple and cogent explanation for how IT and the Internet have changed the economics of commerce and even the buying behavior of individuals.

I believe that the way we buy, communicate, and even socialize over the Internet will ultimately transcend how businesses operate. While it used to be that IT innovation was driven mostly from the inside out (e.g., where large companies build technology that ultimately reaches consumers), I believe that now we have practically inverted our innovation dynamic. We are clearly moving to an outside-in innovation model where much (if not most) of the innovation is starting out at the edge. The most innovative technology is being used by startups and in the home and at the consumer level. The simple fact is that better tools exist today to help me find an obscure song I want to buy than help me find a person inside my company with certain skills or critical data that I might want for a project.

As an example, take a look at Pandora. When you suggest the name of an artist or a song, Pandora delivers a personalized "radio station" to you. My favorite over-the-air station might only deliver one in five "good" songs between commercials.

Given "the long tail" of demand for things like music or videos, then it is likely that corporate and business information and data access would follow a similar curve. But today it doesn't. Why? I believe that access to "the long tail" is fundamentally enabled through the creation of "information-centric" IT infrastructures. Most IT environments inside of large companies, however, are still "application centric." To put it simply, most large companies today, even with all of their IT systems, are organized like brick and mortar stores in terms of information.

Think about it. If you work in a large company, can you:

• Create (or have automatically generated) a personalized internal information portal based on your role and preferences?
• Seek out help on a project by looking at a corporate knowledge base or wiki?
• Find some help on a project by searching a skills repository?
• Create an integrated customer knowledge profile by tying together sales records, feedback, and external market information?

Today, I would say that most companies have mined only a small portion of their own information or knowledge. Most mine information the way The Long Tail describes retailing: We focus on the top 10 to 20 percent. Corporations have a small group of "corporate accounts" or "global accounts" and build the equivalent of brick and mortar businesses around them and set up a process to maintain a personal relationship.

What if there were ways to deliver that same level of personalized service to the other 80 percent of your customers, or even within your company to your employees? The fact is, companies have the raw ingredients—in the form of data—today. It just needs to be unleashed.