I found this on the
Intranet Journal website--
RSS Goes Beyond Blogs, Into the Enterprise. Here's the gist, large companies are finally realizing that RSS isn't blogs and blogs aren't RSS. RSS is an information delivery technology. It allows for data to be structured and streamed in an extremely efficient manner to large numbers of delivery mechanisms. I'm going to write about Newsgator and FeedDemon later, but they are intimately connected to this whole shift.
When I was with pharma we were testing and deploying portals. Idea being, give employees a central, personalized location for information delivery. The problem with a portal is that
most information doesn't change that much day to day. If the company picnic is June 17th, that isn't going to change. HR's policy on tank tops and sandals isn't going to change either. The end result, because the portal
appears stagnant, people stop visiting. Sure you can force people to use web-based systems for expense reporting, etc. Fine, but day-to-day information needs will be fulfilled elsewhere. This is the beauty of RSS, it's more passive. For example all employees, by default, are subscribed to key feeds from HR, Corporate info, IT, etc. Then employees choose what interests them. So if they want a daily update on the cafeteria menu, cool. If not, fine. Regardless of the choice the employee, the employee just has to have the RSS app running and the data comes
to them. Don't get me too wrong, I think simple corporate portals are a good thing, but companies that marry their whole information dissemination strategy on them will be sorely disappointed. Likewise relying solely on e-mail. I don't know how many
hundreds of corporate e-mails I just wholesale deleted with only the barest glance at the subject. Not good. And yes, I did miss important e-mails from upstairs because once you get your 20th moronic, useless corporate e-mail in a day, deleting the 21st feels justified.
So I hope that Enterprise RSS catches on. Certainly over-stuffed corporate e-mail boxes will rejoice.
