One of the obstacles to implementing Enterprise RSS is getting the firm to agree that enterprise RSS is a good investment.RSS is still not a well known technology. People are more likely to keep going back the webpage instead of subscribing to the RSS feed. Relying on people to keep coming back to the blog or wiki to find changes will make the tools less effective and less likely to spread within the firm.
RSS producing tools are less effective without Enterprise RSS. If you have to rely on the people to sign up for RSS feeds themselves, they are less likely to do so.
Of course if you don't have many RSS producing tools inside the firm, then enterprise RSS would not seem to be a good investment for the firm.
So which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Which comes first, the enterprise blog or the enterprise RSS?
The other challenge to enterprise RSS is the broad group of skills needed to chose a vendor and implement. You need desktop applications to test the integration with the email client or the standalone RSS feedreader. You need the network guys to integrate the enterprise RSS server. You need the web developers to integrate enterprise RSS with the RSS producing tools. You need the telecommunications people to integrate the RSS feedreaders on mobile devices. You need the librarian and researchers to help find, organize and disseminate external RSS feeds. You need people using internal RSS producing tools. Fortunately, the enterprise RSS platforms are relatively inexpensive. It is the allocation of firm resources that is a bigger investment.
Personally, I think enterprise RSS is a great investment.
The Enterprise RSS Day of Action is drawing to a close here in Boston.
The initial driver for us (we are implementing Newsgator Enterprise and a home-grown RSS management tool) has been our Information Services team. Their updating and research tasks can be made much more effective by being able to take advantage of RSS feeds from our external information providers.
ReplyDeleteMark -
ReplyDeleteThat is great that the team is using it take advantage of external feeds.
I have not found much receptivity from the decision-makers on grabbing external feeds. They see less of a value proposition. It may just be my bad sales pitch or their lack of understanding of the value of RSS.