What are some unique technology ideas so businesses can begin to move away from using static information (example: excel and forms)? Looking for some ideas on how to make information become a living, breathing organism.

The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery        by Tony Hey, Stewart Tansley, Kristin Tolle has good discussions of the problems involved in combining data from many sources.  Among them are reporting in different units, collecting data from different locations or at different times, so that contexts may be different, catching errors and filling in omissions, sharing credit, ... And in many companies the collective wisdom isn't even in Excel spreadsheets, it's in archived Power Point presentations.  For a single subject, different presentations at different times may each reflect what was know or assumed at that time.  And there may be no record of when the presenters stopped believing an earlier conclusion or changed some default variable or boundary condition. One problem is that it takes more time and energy to produce scholarly reports with references and comparisons to earlier work and many organizations prefer that you move on to the next problem ASAP.  So, if you want to develop a really revolutionary product, build a system to analyze and integrate Power Point presentations.

What you're proposing is not so much a technology based solution as requiring a change to the corporate culture. Mostly, we're used to using email, Word, Excel, Access (the curse of every IT department), PowerPoint, crack-berries, etc. Some of us are familiar with wikis and blogs. Very few of us are used to version control (outside of using filenames) or collaborating on a document through any means other than shared folders or email. We are used to doing a lot of manual data re-entry. Information is seen as a source of power, prestige and the reason for ongoing employment. Many folks are concerned that if others know how to do what they do, then they're a target for the next round of redundancies. The answer to the question "Do you know what the two or three most common filenames are?" is probably a symptom of common attitudes to information management. Casting a quick eye over the blog, many of the technology components already exist. You won't find it in a single product - the scope it too big. You're more likely to find it in a combination of products. Integration between them may be built in but more likely someone will have to write software to do the integration. It is possible to have your VOIP PBX record call data in a CRM from where all your client facing contact happens.

It's a big topic, but essentially it all about data integration. Integrating data based on context, rather than the type of data. We all use many applications to create and manage data, but how do we pull it all together to make it meaningful? How do you raise the priority of the data integration platform to users such that they'll use it over (or in addition to) the tools they already use? As Mike said, the technological components are all there, I think the art and the architecture to make it compelling is the most difficult part. But it is exactly what I'm working on right now.