Well the day has come that James has worked so hard towards - the enterprise rss day of action
Will you be talking to anyone about RSS today? For those CSCer’s reading this my small contribution is a short webcast with my thoughts …. see my profile page in the wiki. I’ll post it here soon (just didn’t have time to upload it to a videocast site last night).
This 6 minute clip on youtube is superb, a real reflection on the power of trust and common sense within the enterprise. (via Luis Suarez)
Scott responded to my recent post on enterprise RSS with a good comparison of my writing compared to that of a more business focused writer. My post was really a rallying call for IT organisations to sing the benefits. Scott has done a good job of reminding me of the main focus - information. Now I’d like to expand on the thoughts about information made in his post and Craig’s post.
Information, and more importantly knowledge, and the application of that information and knowledge is the key to enterprises becoming more innovative. We collaborate to innovate, we need knowledge and information to collaborate.
I collaborate based on information I fundamentally know and maybe have read or trained to learn. RSS allows me to focus my reading in terms of subscribing to things that either interest me or are relevant to me. The importance of this information is paramount to me, I need the latest up to date information and I need to be able to read and spot trends to predict strategic outcomes. The one tool that allows me to do that is an RSS reader, I really can control my reading, control the information and update my knowledge as time goes by.
Enterprise RSS offers this benefit firstly to more people, even in the information worker space I know many who don’t use RSS readers, the second benefit is being able to understand information flow within the enterprise in addition to having a further communication channel.
So I hope this balances my last post with my reflection on the information challenge and how RSS helps. Does this make sense or am I rambling? I’ll shut up now as I think I may be moving into ramble mode 
p.s. don’t forget the enterprise RSS day of action.
How subtle design changes can impact the success of a new product came to me graphically this week with Notes 8. One thing that has concerned me is the screen real estate requirements for the client, especially as I’m an “X” tablet user, as in X’tra small at 1024×768 pixels when just using the tablet.
In Notes 8 with the sidebar opened using a release 7 mail template, a scenario many people will face during an enterprise upgrade (at least for a period of time) the email experience is difficult.
You can see that the subject field is invisible due to the layout in columns of all the individual facets of the email. In fact I got so fed up of this that I stopped design changes getting back to the server and switched to a release 8 design locally. Bingo …
…someone at IBM must have really thought about this issue. I wonder what the advice is in the interim while the client rollout is happening, the recommendations IBM could make to customers who can’t upgrade the mail template design till the last users client is upgraded to release 8 (and we all know how painful it is to get updates to mobile and remote workers at times!). I’m sure some basic recommendations can be made, perhaps a release 7 “sidebar friendly” template.
So I’m doing my best to promote the enterprise RSS day but one thing niggles me. I haven’t seen people beating my door down to architect enterprise RSS capability over the last 12 months. Why could that be? I have a few theories:
People don’t get it?
I do regularly talk to IT folks from both within CSC and our customers and of those folks you find a huge dipole of opinion in terms of understanding what RSS is and its uses. From folks who say “R S what”, to folks who understand what it is when you talk about subscription, to folks who really understand (even better than I) the value of RSS as a medium to communicate and integrate both content for human consumption and content for application consumption and integration. The question here (for later in the post) is how do we help people get it? Most of you reading this “get RSS” as most people read this blog through subscription. So my questions to challenge and find opinion from you would be:
Is RSS anywhere near the top of the enterprise collaboration agendas?
I don’t feel it is. This has to come down to a combination of business requirements, return on investment and potentially marketing. In global terms the enterprise RSS vendors are still small players compared to the titans and even the titans struggle to get their messages heard at times. Its also not raised high on the agendas as only a niche portion of the user base are utilise RSS today, and for those folks the CIO just sees the RSS reader filling the gap.
Folks are waiting for “enterprise RSS” to move into the realm of the email service?
I do think there is a case for combining the delivery capabilities within email services and consumption services within email client technology to properly address the RSS need for information workers. I feel none of the titans have done their client RSS implementations any justice to date. I don’t feel this is what is holding up adoption though, I do feel the key to this is raising the profile and highlighting the quantifiable benefits and better expressing the value of the solutions.
How can IT help folks “get it”?
I feel the only way to succeed here will be small scale pilots within distinct business units with a heavy communication bias. Sales teams, marketing teams, not us boring old IT folks. I hope the enterprise RSS day can switch a few more people on to the potential that enterprise RSS has to offer.
OK so its been around for years in various products but finally we are seeing it emerge into the enterprise software landscape through Sametime Advanced and I’m sure something is coming along soon following Microsoft’s purchase of Parlano.
On the IBM front Adam can tell you more about this in much better detail than I (link). From my perspective the importance of the IBM announcement is that it is linked with the concept of persistent chat for communities. This is the most powerful thing that an IM solution can offer today in my opinion. Twitter for the enterprise? I’m not sure it is but I still think it will be a very powerful tool in the armory. Here is what Sametime Advanced will offer in this arena:
“Keep a continuous discussion running on a specific topic with an interested community of people — in the atmosphere of an informal conversation. You can monitor the chat rooms to which you have subscribed, see how many people/unread messages are in each, the number of unread messages or the number of active participants. Keep yourself in the loop with alerts so you’ll be notified when a group is discussing keywords in which you’re interested.”
This is a very powerful tool for information workers and more importantly groups and teams. Twitter and other tools are filling the gap today but are they truly secure? I don’t share sensitive information through twitter but I’d like a tool which I can use for that purpose. But just how important is twitter - important enough for myself and collegues to never forget to log in to twitter but sometimes forget to log in to sametime!
The next question will be federation of corporate persistent chat tools with public services At that point I’ll end this mindless ramble.
James is organising an enterprise RSS day of action (April 24th). To learn more visit the event wiki.
Steve picked out the best description of the day:
“The purpose of the Enterprise RSS Day of Action on the Thursday 24th April is to help raise awareness for the potential for Enterprise RSS. This wiki will provide Enterprise RSS champions with materials and information they can use to run their own awareness campaigns inside their own organisations.”
Any of the readers who are half decent (i.e. better than me) with GIMP or photoshop can probably improve on this logo attempt from me:
Could all vendors have a URL for bloggers (www.mycompany.com/forblogggers) where we can find images and other information which we can freely reproduce data and images without fear of breaking copyright (especially for images). Am I the only person who finds it difficult at times to publish posts with suitable images?
Although I can’t publish the images here this series of images give an excellent representation of business, home and alternative uses of video in communications and meetings. (hat tip Chase)
Steve commented recently on desktop video conferencing and whether it is ready for prime time. I regularly talk to enterprise customers about video conferencing. One of the main issues I come across is everyone, almost without fail, has unused video conferencing equipment in the corner of a meeting room somewhere in their offices. These folks embraced video conferencing but soon fell out of love.Â
I now try to talk to these same people about the benefits of modern day desktop video solutions, room based high definition video solutions and even telepresence solutions. Its always a difficult conversation to start but I try and reflect on those old implementations. Normally we discuss how video was implemeted into existing meeting rooms, and normally the picture from those generation 1 implementations went like this:
Effectiveness comes from combining video with the other media we used to make meetings effective:
For me the use of video during meetings has meant that video does provide the primary focus for periods during the meeting. However much of the meeting is actually spent with people concentrating on other collaboration media and the audio.  Given the choice would I use video = YES. Given the choice would I use HD video = YES. The reason is just as in a real meeting you need to focus on slides and information, you need to think but then when you talk you want eye contact and to see the body language.
I think we are about to see the emergence of video conferencing especially given the green agenda, organisations will be more and more keen to show their credentials - and the simplest way is to reduce travel. I attended a live webcast from VoiceCon where CISCO hosted an event using their telepresence solution. They made some substantial claims as to how telepresence had reduced their costs and carbon footprint:
“use of videoconferencing at 185 locations has saved the company about $100 million in travel expenses, eliminating about 15 million cubic tons of carbon emissions”, Sue Bostrom, CISCO
CISCO should be congratulated for this. My hope is that I can influence the people I talk to in such a way that they can see the benefits and reap both the cost savings and CO2 savings that CISCO claim.
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