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...

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

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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.

Oliver Young at Forrester predicts 2008 will be a year of strong demand for Web 2.0 tools in the Enterprise. Momentum is being driven by the realization that deploying Web 2.0 technologies is a "high-impact, low-cost method to show leadership and innovation." While social networking behind the firewall will get all the attention, Oliver's report predicts  that 2008 will be a big year for enterprise RSS because RSS is essential for efficiently channeling content from collaborative blogs, wikis and portals to users. Without RSS these sites are just an extension of existing portals. Forrester is predicting that enterprise RSS will grow from about 9 percent to nearly 20 percent by the end of the year. At Attensa we're definitely experiencing the momentum.

We recently had a fascinating conversation with a forward thinking CIO who is the driving force behind a project based on the Attensa Managed RSS platform. The project will dynamically create groups based on ad hoc project teams, build custom feeds and content streams and channel this information directly to the team. When these ad hoc projects are completed, the teams and feeds are shut down automatically, but the AttentionStream reporting remains for analysis.

He pointed out that using technology to channel information is only part of the solution. The greater challenge is creating a collegial culture that better serves the real world information needs of the enterprise. While their technology integration is focused on developing a collaborative environment where people can easily share their expertise, their cultural initiative is focused on encouraging people to do so. He describes it this way, "We want our teams to be able to find what we don't think we know."

For this customer, the earliest days of this Enterprise 2.0 initiative started with the introduction of a wiki. An internal contest was held to name the collaborative initiative. The winner - Wiki - What I Know I Share. Since the introduction of the wiki, training has been focused on turning knowledge brokers, the people who bridge different functions and hierarchical levels into knowledge connectors who use collaborative networks and tools to share their expertise. Knowledge connectors are the people whom others turn to for reliable information, insights and decision making advice.

Here's his advice on bringing the technological and cultural initiatives together.

Get knowledge brokers and connectors into the pool of early adopters for Enterprise 2.0 pilot programs so they can share their experience and lead by example.

Cultivate the skill of knowing where and how to find relevant information.

Reward team members who find and share those gems of information that can solve a problem or advance the business. Tag it, forward it, republish it.

According to research firm Basex "information overload" is the problem of the year for 2008. Didn't they think this was a problem before now? I thought this was the problem of the year back in 2005 when we launched Attensa. Maybe 2005 was the year of RSS.  In any case, every problem of the year needs a solution of the year, so let's call 2008 the Year of Attention.

There is more nuance to information overload than just too much information. There's a productivity yin to the information overload yang. There's no doubt more information is pouring in from more places. New communication and social networking tools make more information available and contribute to information overload, but these tools solve other problems and are,in their own way, efficiency drivers. While information overload cuts into productivity, the ability to access information from anywhere, the real-time delivery of information from multiple sources and the improving the quality of the information itself drives productivity.

RSS and Attention tools for the enterprise like Attensa are bringing the power of context, relevancy, urgency, organization and discovery to bear on information overload with:

• reading tools that give us the information we want, when we want to see it, the way we want to see it
• reading tools that get information out of the inbox and into contextually organized folders
• customizable reading tools that make it easy to rapidly scan through content
• automatic delivery of fresh insights and perspectives that spur innovation
• persistent search that continuously delivers up to the minute relevant information and eliminates time spent searching and surfing
• attention driven technologies that automatically sort and prioritize information based on our unique reading behaviors
• trusted community filtered information that can be easily discovered and streamlines collaboration
• attention analytics and reporting that can reveal the real value of content and information streams

For the enterprise there's an inevitability to all of this. Here's to innovative organizations that are coming to grips with information overload and attention. For these first movers, 2008 is off to a strong start.