Enterprise RSS

Enterprise 2.0 and the Cynicism Checklist

Many years ago, I worked for the CIO of a $2 billion corporation. I was pretty enthusiastic about implementing new technologies, but a lot of the staff seemed pretty cynical.

There usually was good reason for their cynicism. If you believe the frequently mentioned statistic that more than 50 percent of all IT projects fail to meet their goals, you can see part of the reason. For a lot of operational IT people, a good day is when nothing breaks. Doing something new or different often breaks things. So if you combine the limited chance for upside success on most projects with the pretty strong downside potential of breaking things, cynicism starts to look like a helpful survival trait.

I remember many times when a business stakeholder would come to IT full of enthusiasm for some new technology. Often he or she had done lots of “research” and were ready to buy! In many cases, it was my job to be between this boundless optimism and the hardened pessimism of an IT professional who saw it as a train wreck.

So what does this have to do with Enterprise 2.0? The answer is in the “Cynicism Checklist.”

The Cynicism Checklist was my way of testing for the real business value. An IT person can have a good day (can even get a promotion) by implementing a successful technology, so many IT folks are actually open to ideas that pass the test. Right now, a lot of business stakeholders are exploring Enterprise 2.0. If I were having the conversation using the Cynicism Checklist, I would expect the conversation to go something like this.

Me: What’s the problem you’re trying to solve?
Stakeholder: E-mail is just not working for us. We’re buried in e-mail. We need different ways to communicate and collaborate.

Me: How does this Enterprise 2.0 stuff solve that?
Stakeholder: Well, it gets the stuff out of e-mail that shouldn’t be there – collaboration happens in collaboration tools and information, and notifications get nicely organized and distributed in RSS.

Me: Why will this be successful? Why will people use this instead of doing things the same way?
Stakeholder: Well, the thing is, half the members of my staff are already using these tools. The latest college hires came in knowing them and shared them with others. But they are using tools that are running outside the company, and those tools don’t do some things, and I don’t think IT would like it. But the ease of use and success of these tools are just too compelling to ignore.

If the business value was clear and believable after these three questions, the cynicism from the rest of IT was greatly reduced. The cool thing that I’ve been seeing over the last year is that, at many companies, the project to implement Web 2.0 technologies inside the company is being driven by IT. These innovation teams see the same thing as my business stakeholder above – the ease of use and benefit of these technologies is bringing a lot of business value (and a chance for positive recognition).

A little cynicism is good. I’ve seen plenty of technology ideas that couldn’t make it past my Cynicism Checklist. Enterprise 2.0 passes the checklist. It’s taking a lot of different forms at the many companies that we work with, but it always includes an Enterprise RSS component. And it is generating a lot of well-deserved optimism!

Brian Kellner
Vice President of Project Management

RSS is Everywhere!

Well, that may be true on the Internet, but not as true within the enterprise. At NewsGator, we find prospects and customers at different stages in RSS adoption, and almost all ask the same question: "How do I get existing information into RSS?"

There are a number of mechanisms to accomplish this goal, and the answer will depend on your business problem. There are three major business processes and problems that I'll cover here: newsletters, corporate communications and legacy data.

Newsletters

Many of our customers come to us with an e-mail overload problem, and newsletters are part of that. In most cases, we suggest that customers use our E-mail Feed feature. E-mail Feeds are a very accessible way to create RSS from an e-mail. An author creates an e-mail feed, composes the newsletter in an e-mail and sends it to the e-mail feed address. Subscribers to that e-mail feed receive the e-mail within NewsGator Enterprise Server (or Inbox for Outlook, FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, NewsGator Go! for Blackberry or Windows Mobile, or Desktop). Since an e-mail feed is just like any other feed in our system, an enterprising organization could also re-purpose that content to a portal or other external destination using our APIs.

Corporate Communications

As a corporate communicator, blogging is a really convenient way to put your content into RSS. Don't considering blogging as just a bunch of casual posts about your kids or political candidates. Think of it as a really effective alternative to all that staff e-mail. Even e-mails where you have five people on the cc line, you should consider blogging it! (I blogged this internally for feedback before it goes up on our public site for you to read.) Tags associated with a blog post allow you to target that information to the right constituents. Many of our customers are evaluating SharePoint as a blogging platform, since they are either evaluating or rolling out SharePoint as part of an Enterprise 2.0 solution. Plus, SharePoint's integration with the Word 2007, OneNote 2007 and Windows Live Writer makes blogging really accessible to everyone in your organization. Look to other blogging platforms like SixApart's Movable Type -- they may have additional desirable features.

Legacy Data

What about those systems that we won't be replacing in the next 12, 18, or even 48 months? What if I'm in a heterogeneous IT environment? How do you expose that data in RSS? We've partnered with /n software and provide RSSBus as an enabler for just this kind of scenario. RSSBus is a framework that resembles Yahoo Pipes that allows you not only to convert legacy data into RSS format but combine legacy systems output as a mashup that can be distributed through NewsGator Enterprise Server.

Ashley Roach
NGES Product Manager

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