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.