Liveblogging Enterprise 2.0 - Using RSS to Bridge the Information Gap

RSS: Bridging the Gap Between the People and Information that Drive Business

Speaker - Sam Weber, VP Technical Services, KnowNow

Customer story - large outsourcing company and the challenges they face in keeping over 40,000 employees in 120 countries up to speed.

Roughly 30 intranets, portals, and knowledge bases, over 1000 internal blogs - the challenge is how to distribute information in such a mess.

Agenda:

• Information management gap
• The solution
• Customer examples
• Enterprise options
• Q&A

[Sounds a bit more like a pitch than I was expecting this morning . . . didn't even get my grande soy latte this morning, so I may just be less receptive, or more snarky, depending on your perception.]

Problem is information overload - within and without the firewall.

Status quo: Insuffienct. Email is overused, static portals are broken, search isn’t the answer. [What's a static portal? A portal not built on KnowNow's technology? I think "static" and "portal" don't go together.]

[This makes at least twice now that I am seeing the same slides a second time in three days - these same slides were part of the "Launch Pad" presentation form KnowNow.[

The solution: Bridge the Information Gap through Syndication (RSS) in the Enterprise. We call this Live Information Management.

Step 1: Access and monitor all information sources.

Step 2: Automate relevancy.

Step 3: Push relevant information to employees, customers, partners

Step 4: Capture user behavior

Technology - the "Enterprise Syndication Server" [provided by someone like KnowNow, one assumes] in the middle takes all the feeds from within and without, aggregates, filters, finds relevancy, and delivers back to users, via RSS.

In order to effectively leverage RSS within the enterprise, here’s what we’ve found to be the minimum requirements:

• Monitor many if not all sources inside and outside the enterprise
• Match content to users based on relevancy
• Leverage network effects
• Deliver information to users as available
• Provide enterprise security and management
• Enable end-user personalization and control

Customer stories: Wells Fargo, an unnamed bank,

Audience question: Why is it better, in this case, to send out an alert about something which has occured as an RSS feed rather than an email?

Answer: first, we alert a lot of ways - desktop widget, feed reader, portal - there’s lots of ways to do this. Ultimately what we heard was that the alerts via email were frustrating to users because it was just another email in a series.

Options for the Enterpise:

1. Wait for major vendors to offer RSS. (2-5 years)

2. Stick with status quo (email as main information sharing and distrubution tool)

3. Implement and Enterprise Syndication Solution