Enterprise RSS Use Cases Proliferate

At NewsGator, we’ve been developing and marketing Enterprise RSS for more than two years. We have seen more than one hundred different examples of how companies are using or planning to use Enterprise RSS. While we literally see new ones on a daily basis, there are three broad categories that encompass many of the ways that organizations deploy Enterprise RSS solutions to help solve a problem that affects a large segment of the employee base, often as part of a larger technology initiative. These examples are not mutually exclusive, and many larger organizations undertake Enterprise RSS projects for two or even three of the purposes, often finding that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Internal Communications

A primary challenge for many corporate communications, marketing and HR professionals is ensuring that the information they send out gets read and/or acted upon by stakeholders (departments, executive staff, project teams, entire company). The problem occurs in part because mass e-mails are often missed or ignored, and corporate portals are underutilized. RSS helps to solve this problem.

Information about a company, its products, competitors and industry can be delivered via RSS feeds, providing an alternative or complement to newsletters and mass e-mails. Individual users, specific groups or the entire organization can be subscribed to relevant RSS feeds from built-in readers in the enterprise portal, e-mail clients (in a folder outside of the inbox), Web browsers, mobile devices and desktop readers, including:

- Company announcements, department newsletters, meeting notes
- Internal research and development projects
- Clippings containing highly relevant information sorted by product, brand, market or competitor (Either standalone or as a replacement for newsletters)
- High-profile internal and external blogs and news feeds
- Benefit, policy and financial information from HR and Finance
- Notifications from CRM, ERP, HR, and SCM applications

A related but increasingly popular twist on this use case is leveraging Enterprise RSS to inform employees about critical information when they don’t have dedicated computers or e-mail access. A very large retail bank is deploying a system that notifies tellers about fraudulent checks in their area and IT outages by flashing alerts on their desktops via a taskbar-based mini-RSS reader. This use case is also applicable in manufacturing, retail and entertainment environments and is also helpful for mobile-based service and support workers.

Information Aggregation and Syndication

Information is a critical currency for getting business done, and the volume of it that exists, both internally and externally, is growing at a rapid rate. For sales, marketing, communications, services or R&D employees (among others), finding and consuming this information is extremely time-consuming and often fruitless.

At their core, RSS aggregators are designed to solve this problem by bringing everything together and eliminating the need to visit multiple web pages or sift through e-mail newsletters. Unlike individual-use aggregators, Enterprise RSS systems allow you to access external feeds from news sites, blogs and other content providers but also securely subscribe to feeds from internal sources, including blogs, wikis, portals, content management systems and enterprise applications. In addition, due to the broad set of reading options and administrative functionality, it is not a requirement for the users to be RSS experts. Systems such as NewsGator Enterprise Server allow managers and/or administrators to subscribe employees to relevant feeds, including:

- Data feeds from premium content providers such as Thomson or Factiva
- Meeting notes from wikis
- Project collaboration updates
- Internal research and development projects
- Clippings containing highly relevant information sorted by product, market or competitor
- Pertinent internal and external blogs and news feeds
- Notifications of new marketing documents or sales tools
- Audio and video podcasts containing training curricula
- Notifications from CRM, ERP, HR, and SCM applications

Looking at absolute numbers of deployments, this is probably the most popular use case as it affects a large segment of almost any organization. We’ve seen numerous deployments in legal, pharmaceutical, chemical, financial services, insurance and technology settings, among others.

Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration

Larger organizations often struggle to ensure that employee collaboration occurs in a healthy, productive manner. How do they make sure people stay up-to-date without drowning in a sea of information? How do individuals make others aware of their particular expertise?

Enterprise 2.0 or Social Software tools such as wikis, podcasts, tagging, and social networking solutions are often used to address this challenge. With e-mail an increasingly ineffective method of notification, success of these tools requires an effective notification mechanism so users don’t have to continually check the different sites to see if something has been added or updated.

Enterprise RSS platforms can deliver these notifications to a variety of different places where users can easily access them, as outlined above. RSS feeds from blogs and wikis also become more easily discoverable and searchable. Organizations can embed one-click “chiclets” to let users automatically subscribe to feeds from:

- Executive or employee blogs
- Departmental or project wikis
- Social networking systems
- Podcasts

While many companies deploying internal blogs as part of an internal communications effort (an example of multiple use cases in action), or particular groups utilizing wikis, there are a number of organizations in the manufacturing sector (aerospace and defense and other discrete manufacturers) and federal government departments that are facing the prospect of seeing mass retirements among the most experienced parts of their workforces.

Some of the more forward-looking ones are trying to address the loss of the “tacit knowledge” that exists within the heads of these employees through the use of Web 2.0 tools. The implementation is usually a combination of blogs and wikis (for sharing the knowledge formally) and social networking systems (to let younger workers find other people with similar areas of expertise and elicit that information informally). RSS is then used as the mechanism for notifying users of updates from those tools.

We will focus more specifically on various functions or industries, but feel free to post comments if you have any specific questions in the interim.

Todd Berkowitz
Marketing Director

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