Re: RSS in the Enterprise

Daniela Barbosa, a blogger (see Daniela Barbosa Chitchatting about Information Delivery) and Information Consultant for Factiva, was recently writing about RSS in the Enterprise. A wide variety of interesting thoughts on Daniela's blog - take a look and consume that RSS feed...

In her post, RSS in the Enterprise, she discusses a number of items, starting with RSS in the enterprise, and how personalization of information flows and the ability of users to own their own attention to content (opt-in/opt-out) as balanced vs. a company's need to push/provide required content (this is the portal personalization conversation all over again - something that keeps coming up in my conversations with next-gen search providers who are moving in that direction), a nice summary of the keynote that Matthew Glotzback, Google Enterprise Product Manager, provided at our April Information Intelligence Summit - specifically, the evolution of the 'office worker' to the 'knowledge workers' to the 'Self Directed Innovator' (which reminds me I need to catch back up with him post-event for a podcast interview), and then back to where RSS, blogs, wikis and aggregrators are taking us as individuals and companies - another slowly evolving story which I've been attempting to push along as well.

I'm going to latch onto the "meta-concept" of RSS in the Enterprise from her post, and give that a tangential whirl here...

As another way for content to move throughout the organization, RSS has both a tiny and gigantic potential impact. Tiny in the sense that RSS (and Atom, etc.) is not some bit of technical magic (RSS is the future, RSS will save us all! [most people still have no idea what RSS is, or why they should care - and with any luck, RSS creation and consumption will become so invisible that they will never know - but that's another story]), but simply a known standard entity (badly composed/created/consumed by some systems, perhaps) which is quite lightweight when you get down to it (a good thing), and gigantic in that by the simple adoption of RSS et al as a transmission medium, all (much anyway) of the effort spent in consuming and regurgitating other "proprietary" content streams can be sent on more productive work.

The vast majority of time and money spent on implementation and integration of enterprise systems is where the glue needs to be created to connect systems - the interfaces and APIs - and then in ensuring that the internals of the system (search, portals, knowledge management, etc.) are flowing freely as well, of course, all of this targeted at getting useful work done, not just to satisfy some desire to "embrace RSS" in a vacuum.

We (Delphi Group) had written in early 2003 in a whitepaper entitled "The Value of Standards" (available at DelphiGroup.com in the Research section) about what organizations stood to gain and what they were, in fact, doing around "standards" - whether that be standard processes, operating systems, interface standards, "stacks" (such as Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP or LAMP as it's known), or the like.

Embracing and using standards for what they can do, and knowing what they cannot do, allows enterprises (and individuals) to shed much of the overhead (almost entirely pure cost, really) in constantly reinventing new connection points, and sturggling to juggle multiple ways to connect systems, and focus instead on the real work to be done. This is what has allowed the newest brands of startups (yes, those "Web 2.0" folks) to jump straight out of the gate, on the backs of "standards-based" infrastructure that, to this new breed, has become invisible infrastructure that "just works." This is the same reason that the buzz-worthy Ruby on Rails (or RoR) agile web development framework is gaining such steam as well - as a standards-in-making - by removing, upfront, much of the annoying gruntwork of web development, putting together the everyday web apps of forms, database lookups, e-mail subsystems, etc. is mostly done for you, and the extra-value-add on top of this invisible, yet invaluable infrastructure, is where the money will be made and the value seen by customers/users.

If there wasn't the interplay between cost-reduction (a worthy cause, but not a sole focus) via these standards, and value-creation on top and beyond these standards, I would be beating a different drum, but there is something afoot here, and whether the enterprise adoption of RSS skyrockets as has been predicted for several years now (overnight success usually takes a few years, as they say in the music biz), what RSS and other standards imply is a *very* important trend to watch and begin adopting, wherever it makes sense in the organization.

As readers of this blog, I would love to hear from you on what standards (RSS or otherwise) you are adopting in the enterprise, and where it is targetted - towards inward-facing systems, customer-facing, extranets, etc.. I'm particularly interested in organizations who are on a 2nd or 3rd generation portal deployment, and how that evolution has driven adoption of standards - and what standards those would be. Comment, trackback, get in touch... let me know what you're seeing in your organizations.

Comments

[Daniela Barbosa]

The interesting thing is that RSS is supposed to be, well it is agnostic. when we start talking about standards folks tend to think application and software. For example, from what i could translate from one of the TrackBacks on this post (threw into BabelFish), it talks about Microsoft, who are making a big push to standarize RSS delivery within their products. The PM for Outlook 2007 in a Channel 9 videocast, mentions that RSS integration will be standard and that users will not have to even know it is RSS. True and important for the success of RSS especially in enterprises whose knowledge/creative workers that have different levels of web savy skills. The best part of adoption of RSS is the power that is it giving the content creators- look at the agreement between Technorati and AP that was announced this week.

Whether consumer or creator the control is more in our hands then ever.
(for a link to the MSFT Channel 9 post see http://danielabarbosa.blogspot.com/2006/05/look-at-outlook-2007.html )

[Dan Keldsen]

Daniela - Thanks for the comment - we do seem to be circling the same thoughts here - glad we stumbled onto each other's blogs!

Agreed - Standards can come in from any angle, applications/systems, operating systems, networking protocols, content standards, business processes (the healthcare-focused arm of our parent company, Perot Systems, is blazing a path on that front - interesting stuff), etc..

RSS *should* be agnostic, and in many cases is, but standards can so easily be mis-interpreted (and subverted) - witness the many variants, including ATOM just around RSS. The "ideal" concept behind RSS is similar to the promise of the Web from the early days - it provides a "standard" way for systems, creators and readers of content to exchange information, very easily. However, like the web, and HTML in particular, creating RSS, reading it, and using it as a pipeline between systems isn't nearly as easy as it could and should be.

RSS needs to become both more visible and understandable to developers, particularly in the enterprise (although RSS is still not pervasive in the non-blog web world, why?), and invisible/usable to everyone else - the great unwashed massses who *will* never, and *should* never need know what RSS is, or how it works.

Blogs (thankfully) have begun to make it obvious to people that content management and web-publishing don't have to be expensive and complicated undertakings, and RSS is certainly a key component of that - but I'm not sure we're even at the topmost tip of the iceberg yet in getting *really large* numbers of people to understand what that means now, and implies for the future. That Microsoft will be creating RSS "out of the box" with the next iteration of Office is good news, although we'll have to wait and see how invisible and usable Microsoft makes this for the masses.

Thanks for pointing out the link for the Channel 9 posting on your site, I keep hearing of these famous (infamous?) interviews, and hadn't made the time to "go there" yet ( direct link to the interview: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=195021#195021 ).

The Technorati and AP announcement is definitely interesting as well - saw it, briefly thought about it, but haven't processed it enough just yet to have enlightened thoughts there. Perhaps after the long weekend?

Cheers, and thanks again for the cross-blog conversation.

Dan