How does a 105-year-old company integrate enterprise 2.0 technologies with business process management tools to increase the efficiency of its operations? It starts with taking a hard and practical look at the challenges behind:

• Accelerating the pace of decision-making and getting better results
• Getting more value from an organization’s intellectual assets
• Keeping clients and staff informed through transparency and easier ways to share relevant information
• Ensuring that the right information gets to the right people in a timely fashion

These would be daunting challenges for an IT organization managing static resources in a controlled operations center. When your organization is constantly moving at sea, you add another level of complexity.

Wallem Services Limited sets a new standard managing IT innovation and services on a global basis. Their offices are not only distributed around the world, most of their offices float. Headquartered in Hong Kong, the Wallem Group's 8,500 employees in 21 countries provide a complete suite of value-added management services for more than 300 vessels that are constantly on the move around the world.

Patrick Slesinger, director and CIO of Wallem, is working to transition Wallem from being a top-down, command and control directed business to one where transparency unlocks the value of information in Wallem’s systems and delivers the highest levels of customer value.

The Wallem procurement system integrates K2 Blackpearl workflow management engine with Microsoft SharePoint and the Attensa Managed RSS Platform to create an innovative enterprise 2.0 application that brings a collaborative and transparent approach to the vessel management procurement activities.

Attensa's CTO and co-founder, Eric Hayes and K2's Dave Marcus and Seb Garrioch are the technical team behind the project.

We work with customers in Web meetings, on the phone and in IM everyday. Getting to meet Patrick at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston was a joy. He is a true global citizen. He kicked off his presentation and demonstration of this mashup by saying, "Presenting a live demo at a conference can either be the stupidest or the boldest thing you can do to show a technology solution." The demonstration came off without a hitch, a rare occurrence given the flaky Internet connections at the conference hotel. Chalk one up for bold.

In his talk Patrick enlightened us about bunkers and lubes, gave his perspective on the acceptance of smoking around the world and shared how salty seafarer language can enhance or tank your presentation depending on the audience.

Here are some of the comments following Patrick's session

"It makes a lot of sense. You presented a business process.You presented a very clear use case and articulated it very well. It is one the best actual use cases of integrating Enterprise 2.0. into the business process."

"All these talks about democratizing the workforce, yours is the only example that reflects the real world."

And, from Mike Gotta, who hosted the presentation: "This is not the typical RSS application. That was great. I think it’s stunning how simple things can work so well."

In Patrick's words, “This is not an elegant solution. But guess what? It adds value. It’s simple. Everyone knows what’s going on. If my chief architect leaves, I can hire someone else who will understand it. Business isn’t at risk.”

Here are the slides and screenshots from the demonstration.

| View | Upload your own

Catching up on reading recently I picked up and article titled Everywhere and nowhere that I had set aside regarding social networks appearing in the March 19, 2008 edition of the Economist. The question raised is whether there is a business behind the current crop of Social Networking sites. I don't have a dog in that fight. I was struck however by a comment by Charlene Li of Forrester Research. She observed future social networks “will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be.” No more logging on to Facebook just to see the “news feed” of updates from your friends; instead it will come straight to your e-mail inbox, RSS reader or instant messenger. No need to upload photos to Facebook to show them to friends, since those with privacy permissions in your electronic address book can automatically get them.

I think this is a wonderful observation. As it relates to RSS I do have a dog in the fight. Right now I believe the opportunities for RSS/XML syndication to improve user experiences in our network world is grossly under appreciated. This has been highlighted recently as I have worked with business executives that are not familiar with RSS based tools. I will cover those discussions in a separate post. What I think is interesting for this discussion and about Charlene Li's observation is the difference between a "social portal" and a "social network". As the tools and services evolve I hope that these definitions will start to evolve to better reflect what is happening.

Networks are generally thought of as nodes with interconnectivity. When I visit Facebook as an example I am viewing a window into a social network. It is only one of my social networks that I see through that window. I have a similar view of my working social network at Attensa in our Clearspace community and other views of other areas of my social network elsewhere. I am beginning to think of these as Social Portals. When these portals are all connected they form my Social Network.

You can probably see this one coming..... how do I connect them in order to form my social network? RSS. I do not want to be misunderstood on this point. I am not saying that RSS is the center of my network I am simply saying that it is plumbing that allows me to observe and interact with my entire network.

This may not make sense if your view of RSS is based on a traditional RSS reader or aggregation portal. Most peoples is, even those using RSS to monitor the live web. Expanding this perspective has been the fun part of showing business people what can be done with the Attensa solution. Our recently completed version 3.0 shows the promise of RSS and the fulfillment the concept of "social networks" by providing a framework for both "subscribing" and "publishing" across the bounds of "social portals". Using this tool I can participate and interact across all the individual portal views. I often want to take information or interactions from one portal and share them with another by republishing it. I often also want to contribute thoughts directly to one or more communities without having to navigate through the different portals. I can also connect blogs and social portals etc. Now we are talking social network.

I have also found the best way to describe this is to show it. So I vow in the coming days to do some screen cast discussions. Many people that follow Attensa and this blog are very familiar with RSS so you may already be thinking about these topics but I hope that the discussions will help expand the view of RSS as a framework "publish-subscribe" networks. Within business organizations these are powerful concepts that connect not only workplace social applications but also core IT systems and people directly. The implications for innovation, efficiency and competitiveness are big.

On the issue of social portals and social networks, I hope that the market will begin to make some distinctions that are not being made today. That may be too much to ask of the same group that came up with "marketecture" terms such as "social graphs" but we can hope. In the end I guess you can call it anything you want as long as the result is connected, productive and profitable.

With the new attensa.com site launched today and a new version of the Attensa Managed RSS platform in the bag, we're heading to Boston for the Enterprise 2.0 conference.

We're one of pod people in the exhibit area. If you are heading to the conference stop by pod 404 by:

Tuesday, June 10: 11:00 am – 1:00 pm & 4:30 pm – 6:30 pm

Wednesday, June 11: 12:00 pm – 2:00 pm & 4:30 pm – 6:30 pm

On Tuesday at 1:00 I'll be joining a panel hosted by Mike Gotta:

Enterprise RSS: Connecting People, Information & Communities

Here's the panel overview:

"Delivering a communication channel that enables people to subscribe to the information they need, includes filtering and alerting mechanisms to notify people of important changes, and provides access points across multiple application contexts, is an incredibly powerful solution. Deployment of feed syndication platforms to manage proliferation of RSS feeds can improve worker productivity, drive business performance and aid in community-building efforts across people with common information interests. In this panel, senior strategists from leading enterprise RSS vendors and enterprise customers share their perspectives on market trends across different industries."

And we wrap it up on Wednesday afternoon with our friend and customer Patrick Slesinger, the innovative CIO of the Wallem Group,  in a session: Integrating RSS and Business Process.

Patrick will be demonstrating how Wallem is integrating Attensa managed RSS with K2 BlackPearl business process management and workflow tools to automate and communicate procurement processes in a rather unique globally distributed enterprise. Wallem manages more than 300 ships, so most of their offices float and are on the move around the world.

A heartfelt thanks to James Dellow of ChiefTech for getting this party started. He's put together a great enterprise RSS wiki loaded with resources for organizations who want to get started with RSS for communication and collaboration delivery.

Today started with a bang at Attensa. We just completed a great briefing and demo with a project manager for the web development group of a big delicious candy company. We had a great talk about enterprise RSS and specialty chocolates. He's deep into creating a single point for team collaboration for his organization and wants content delivered automatically and intelligently to the team members.

ChiefTech has even given us a list of 10 things he wants from enterprise RSS...

| View | Upload your own

So we're giving him most of what he wants...with more on the way.

| View | Upload your own

If you want to jump start your collaboration and communication initiative let's connect.

"RSS/XML. Nobody would know who I am or what my initials mean, but I make everything work together. I’d be the foundation of mashups, social applications, and widgets. Without me, the social Web would grind to a halt."

And so would enterprise 2.0.

How big? The whole enterprise 2.0 enchilada is projected to be $4.6 billion by 2013...that's big.

Enterprise RSS growing to $563 million in the next five years...Giddy Up!

Here's the net/net from the executive summary:

"Enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies will grow strongly over the next five years, reaching $4.6 billion globally by 2013, with social networking, mashups, and RSS capturing the greatest share. In all, the market for enterprise Web 2.0 tools will be defined by commoditization, eroding prices, and subsumption into other enterprise collaboration software over the next five years; it will eventually disappear into the fabric of the enterprise, despite the major impacts the technology will have on how businesses market their products and optimize their workforces."

Here are some things that jumped out at me from the report and recent coverage of the Forrester findings...

From Dion Hinchcliffe: Enterprise 2.0 Industry Matures as Businesses Grapple with its Potential:

"The key hallmark of Web 2.0 is efficiency for end users, and the ultimate goal is to use technology like Ajax, rich Internet applications, blogs, wikis, and social networks to foster productive, advantageous behavior among employees, customers, partners, and other networks such as Social Computing, the Information Workplace, and collective intelligence."

From Larry Dignan at ZDNet: Social Networking Will be Biggest Enterprise 2.0 Priority by 2013

"In addition, I.T. departments currently work with a host of legacy applications. The new tools, in order to compete with these, will have to be able to integrate with existing technology, at least for the time being, in order to be fully effective."

"Across the board, Web 2.0 tools enter a crowded space full of legacy software and processes that are difficult to displace and with which Web 2.0 software must integrate to be fully effective. Integration with lightweight applications like email and Excel, as well as heavier applications like Web content management suites, campaign management software, portal software, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, must all be addressed over time."

From Sarah Perex at Read Write Web Enterprise 2.0 to Become a $4.6 Billion Industry by 2013

"To make matters worse, I.T. tends to view Web 2.0 tools as being insecure at best, or, at worst, a security threat to the business. They also don't trust what they perceive to be "consumer-grade" technologies, which they don't believe have the power to scale to the size that an enterprise demands."

I'm in full agreement with Dion and Larry's observation. I take issue with Sarah's blanket statement. Our experience is very different. We are working with forward thinking IT professionals who are partnering with business teams to integrate Web 2.0 technologies to enhance existing systems and business processes. Rather than isolated projects, we are working on enterprise-wide deployments designed to deliver communication and collaboration to every member of the workforce. The team approach isn't just a good idea. It's essential to successful implementation. We work with IT to effectively handle scaling, security, LDAP synchronization, provisioning and integration with legacy apps. We're collaborating with the business team to create new communication and collaboration processes and training programs that take the cultural and change management challenges head on.

Thanks to James Dellow for putting the Enterprise Day of Action stake in the ground. I am enjoying the active thinking about RSS in the Enterprise. It is fascinating to observe and participate in the discussion. There is room for a wide array of thought about RSS inside of organizations. I know this question has been asked before but I think it is worth continued evaluation - As early adopters (read geeks), are we so close to XML syndication thinking that we struggle for perspective. I think that is the challenge for vendors, consultants and early enterprises sponsors. Hugh MacLeod has a classic gapingvoid cartoon called stop worrying which says "stop worrying about technology and start worrying about who trust you." Seems relevant to us in the "RSS Community".

Is RSS a "Web 2.0" technology? sure. Is publish-subscribe a better approach for many forms of communication in general? sure. Does subscribing to an update via RSS work better keep my mail less cluttered and more useful? yup. Is RSS/Atom a better way to consume important information sources? sure. Is it a good tool to leverage and broadcast your portal or community space to improve usability? sure. Is "subscribe" metaphor for the web on par with "browse" and "search"? I think so. Is RSS plumbing to loosely couple many of the social computing tools? sure. Can you use RSS based tools to efficiently observe and process information flow on the live web via search feeds/channels? sure. Is it a personal productivity tool? sure. A strategic business tool? sure. And on and on.

Ironically it is also the tool I am using daily to participate in this community of thought.

There's a scary headline in the New York Times today: Enterprise 2.0 A Computer Security Nightmare?

The article stems from a research report issued by Palo Alto Networks, a start-up developing next-generation firewalls.  The report shows that traditional firewall technology is not keeping pace with proliferation of Web apps.

Rather than tightening the screws, maybe there's a better answer. Companies embracing and implementing Enterprise 2.0 applications behind the firewall take control, manage the process, keep their proprietary information secure, energize their workforce and reap the collaboration and communication benefits that come from creatively using social networking software to get work done.

Managed RSS platforms can be securely set up behind the firewall to automatically and intelligently deliver relevant content from internal and external news sources, blogs, wikis and forums. Analytics and reporting on the content being consumed can be used to identify the most efficient communication channels and sources of the highest value content. And, the organization keeps their data safely on their network and hardware.

Two posts caught my attention last week. Stu Downes' Enterprise RSS Day: Why Don't you use Enterprise RSS? and Craig Roth's Cornering the Corner Office about Information Overload.

What is striking about these two posts is how they address the same issue from two completely different perspectives: the Technologist Perspective and the Business Perspective.

Stu wonders why "I haven’t seen people beating my door down to architect enterprise RSS capability over the last 12 months." Maybe they've been coming to our door. In fact, the interest in Attensa's managed RSS platform has accelerated exponentially over the last six months.

He also asks "Is RSS anywhere near the top of enterprise collaboration agendas?" As far as agenda setting goes, in our view RSS might not be near the top of a CIO agenda, but it is at the heart of streamlining communication and collaboration.

I doubt Stu is getting many customer inquiries regarding the purchase of wikimarkup language or metablog API's. It's more likely his customers are looking for collaboration platforms and tools that reduce the friction of information transactions and make it easier for people to discover, filter, share highly relevant information.

We've struggled with similar questions until we wrapped our minds around separating the business questions from the technology questions. When we launched Attensa in the summer of 2005 we brought on a team of college interns to help us research the applications for managed RSS. We called them the Dog Pound because we were barking up the wrong tree in our approach to customer conversations.

Like most new technology companies we had a vision of how RSS could be used behind the firewall and we wanted feedback to see if we were on target. In the early days we started these conversations by focusing on the technology. These conversations didn't get very far. The inside joke was that we were starting the conversations by asking, "How many pounds of RSS would you like to buy today?" You live and learn. Now we start the conversation talking about communication and collaboration challenges. The conversations last longer and are far more meaningful.

Take the conversation covered in Craig Roths blog about a Wall Street Journal interview with Chevron's CIO, Gary Masada. This interview echoes the conversations we are having on a daily basis with customers and prospective customers."What is the biggest challenge you face as a CIO?" Masada's answer, "Getting our arms around all the information we have."

When it comes to talking about getting your arms around the information you and Enterprise RSS, it all comes back to Andrew McAfee's SLATES:

Search | Links | Authorship | Tags | Extensions | Signals

"SLATES describes the combined use of effective enterprise search and discovery, using links to connect information together into a meaningful information ecosystem using the model of the Web, providing low-barrier social tools for public authorship of enterprise content, tags to let users created emergent organizational structure, extensions to spontaneously provide intelligent content suggestions similar to Amazon's recommendation system, and signals to let users know when enterprise information they care about has been published or updated, such as when a corporate RSS feed of interest changes."

Replacing the abbreviation RSS with words like signals, alerts, delivery is far more descriptive and useful to customers. One of our customers has named their RSS initiative project: Communication & Collaboration Delivery. That's got a much better ring to it than Enterprise RSS.

Chuck Hollis writes about EMC's experience with Jive Software's Clearspace collaboration platform. With 3000 active users who don't want to miss anything, EMC has a new source of information overload. This isn't the first time we've heard about this phenomenon. In fact, we've given it a name - the challenge of social scaling. The emerging challenge of Social Scaling is the problem created when growing numbers of users and systems publish to a common location. As the volume of information increases within the community, it becomes increasingly difficult for users to manage.

As Chuck points out, it's a good news - bad news story. The good news, people are hungry for tools that make sharing ideas, project updates, news and opinions easy. Clearspace is a great tool for doing just that. The bad news, a big noisy channel of unfiltered information develops and grows.

Putting Attention technology to work might just be answer. Using the intelligent prioritization capabilities of Attensa's feed readers, users can subscribe to multiple Clearspace community feeds, put them in a category folder and use the Article View to bring the most relevant articles to the top.

The attention filtering and prioritization is all done in the background based on your personal implicit and explicit reading behaviors and content cues from the posts that capture your attention. Users can rapidly scan through lots of information when the things they find most interesting bubble up to the top automatically.

For the community and the enterprise, attention analytics and reporting provided by the Attensa Feed Server can provide insight into identifying not only the most active communities, but the communities that provide the most meaningful and relevant content.

Throw in a seamless cycle of publish subscribe with the ability to publish into Clearspace with a click from your feed reader and you've got a collaboration ecosystem that can scale effectively.