Recently Michael Sampson observed the alignment between the StreamServer's capabilities and his viewpoint regarding the foundations of Organizational Collaboration. His series of posts starts here.

Michael observed:
"I have been reading through the Attensa site today, in preparation for some upcoming blog posts on my Organizational Collaboration: Four Foundations project. What really stands out to me is the alignment between my view of organizational collaboration and what Attensa has developed. As in:
- the ability to look across multiple systems, rather than being constrained to one system.
- the normalization capabilities, for bringing items together from different sytems.
- the ability to make new happenings available in a variety of formats, and to different devices.
- the ability for people to enhance what is published in a channel, through comments, tags, and re-publication options.

Mmm, interesting times."

Looking forward to the future posts.

McKinsey recently published an interesting article titled Data to dollars: Supporting top management with next-generation executive information systems.

While the focus of the article is the challenge and opportunity facing CIO's to deliver key performance indicators to top layers of management, I was struck by the ubiquity of the business problem the authors identify. As the authors describe: "It's a challenging mission because for all the data flowing through companies, executives often struggle to find the information they need to make sound decisions. Potentially valuable content is frequently trapped in organizational silos, lost in transit from one system to another, bypassed by inadequately tuned data collection systems, or presented in user-unfriendly formats. Although wired with layers of information gathering technology, organizations still find it difficult to deliver the right data to the right people." Calling this a "failure to deliver" they note "When information systems are dysfunctional, performance suffers. [emphasis added]

These same factors contribute to the widespread challenge impacting people involved in knowledge work throughout organizations of all sizes. For decades much of the focus of business IT has been enabling information creation and business processes. The pace of content creation continues to accelerate; driven by social software and changes in communication behavior in the work environment.

The challenges identified by the article - information silos, lack of user friendly interfaces, findability are all present across business organizations. The outcome "performance suffers" is also present in the broader context because it is people that make business decisions, sell and service customers, innovate and execute strategy. This makes it critical to empower people to thrive rather than be overwhelmed by information. Rethinking information delivery is very important.

This is why I am so enthusiastic about the work we are doing at Attensa. Focusing on information delivery has immediate business impacts and complements all of the existing information assets of a business.

There is enormous business value in addressing the underlying information infrastructure needed to get the right information to the right people and in a way that it is easy for them to consume. Some key considerations for general information and knowledge awareness:
- Establish a common aggregation service inside your network that can collect information activity from systems, content publishers and social communications solutions inside and outside your organization.
- Centralize a library or information marketplace that follows a taxonomy organization specifically designed around your business and its people.
- Enable multiple delivery locations to cross-pollinate information and interaction. For example, a dedicated web dashboard, portlet/widgets, email options and mobile.

These are first steps. The value of setting up a common information distribution infrastructure improves as it is used. Additional value follows as people use the same infrastructure to share information or knowledge across silos and organizational boundaries.

In addition this approach improves the the value and lifespan of all the systems that feed into it by making the information more visible and accessible.

There are an increasing number of common standards that can be leveraged to create the solution. This makes the solution a low cost-high impact project. As the volume of information and activity grows organizations can empower their people and leverage their existing systems more effectively than ever.

From Mckinsey Quarterly

A recent discussion with a customer centered on better decision making as their core business objective for the Attensa server. It was interesting and blunt. Better information, better decisions. Every employee, regardless of their place in the organization makes many decisions on a daily basis. Regardless of the complexity of the decision, better inputs makes for better decisions and better decisions drive better execution, innovation etc.

At the recent ReadWriteWeb Real Time Summit there were similar conversations. You might think that getting a bunch of bleeding edge real-time geeks together would lead to a bunch of esoteric discussions. There were some (I would have been disappointed otherwise). However, many of the discussions both casual and coordinated centered on how we leverage the "real time web" to support better decisions ranging from customer interactions, advertising, branding and investment.

Purpose is a good thing. There is a pleasant simplicity in notion of enabling better decisions. This is particularly true given that current technology marketing can be full of references to "social", "real-time", "collaboration", "Web 2.0", "Enterprise 2.0", "Semantic Web" to name a few. Then there is always the venerable and controversial "Enterprise RSS". I am not condemning these terms. They are just more impactful when tied to business results.

This is a nice framework for us to lead into future posts relating to solution designs using Attensa to facilitate the flow of information and knowledge between users and systems within the overall enterprise environment ..... and thus enable better decisions.....

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference is coming up in San Francisco. If you are attending drop us a note and I look forward to the discussions that take place there.

We announced the new Attensa StreamServer today. It was not a secret we just had not formally announced it. More soon. http://www.attensa.com/news/news.php

This one is just for fun. This past July Gestalt Effect a Portland based consulting group focussed on team and organizational collaboration in large organizations, produced a short video for the Ignite Portland event. I forgot to share it. In this age of buzzwords (present company included) there is something refreshing about a pitch that says "connect your people and your stuff"

Gestalt Effect's Ignite Portland Ad - Connect your people and your stuff. from Gestalt Effect on Vimeo.

This is just a quick post to echo the comments this weekend by Dave Winer and Fred Wilson regarding RSS syndication.

Fred Wilson explains why RSS is alive and well and the premise of calling it dead is silly. See the post here.

Dave Winer contributes his view with this post explaining value of RSS from both a practical and technical perspective.

I had planned a longer post on the issue at some point soon. Particularly the notion that the new kid "Twitter" is knocking the old kid "RSS" off the block because of Twitters real time nature. Dave Winer tackles this issue nicely in his post. I am tempted to rest on a resounding "yea....what he said" response.

However, the issue I want to explore is still outstanding and it relates to the difference between real time and real awareness because in many contexts real awareness trumps real time for value.

Also it is worth noting the news today of Wordpress support for RSSCloud see ReadWriteWeb here or TechCrunch here. Not to mention the recent announcement of Pubsubhubbub. Both approaches implement instant notifications for RSS. Seems like we are just getting started......

Normal scaling discussions center on the ability of a solution to effectively satisfy increasing demands driven by growth in users, data or some other key metric. Social Scaling relates to the ability of social software to maintain effectiveness with increasing participation. Participation includes the number of active users as well as the utilization of the solution by those users.

In many ways the need to confront these challenges is desirable. At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference this past June many of the discussions concerned adoption. Software vendors are making user adoption more organic and best practices are emerging to encourage adoption. As more users participate and increase their usage, organizations are confronted with a new challenge. Simply stated, when the volume of user created content speeds up to the point that it interferes with the desired collaborative benefits of the solution the issue of "social scaling" is a problem. Its a buzz kill for your project to be so successful it gets in its own way.

This is not a new issue but in many ways ignorance has been bliss. Email has been the primary tool for wide-scale user publishing and sharing. Most of these interactions quietly become buried and die in many separate inboxes often fragmented by reply-to and forward-to activity. With social software the interaction design and desired result is obviously different. Interactions are centralized around topics or context and they are persisted. The pace of content contribution and interaction becomes very high. This velocity and growth of information ultimately becomes a barrier to finding, utilizing and sharing information.

In a conversation with a friend recently about this topic he brought up the similarities to the discussions occurring about the challenge and opportunity of "Big Data". Social scaling is in-fact a variant of the same set of trends. In fact, the meta data that we can collect from user attention and other behavior will be part of the solution. But even before we consider advanced issues we need to make sure that users can manage the streams of information these systems generate in a simple and intuitive way.

This concerns me because it is critical to achieving adoption success and keeping users engaged in large scale implementations of social software tools. In another recent conversation with a group of MBA students I am working with they described an almost defeatist attitude of some they were interviewing regarding the status of information systems in a particular market segment. That is an attitude that can create increased friction to adoption and change management.

Internally at Attensa we defined the term social scaling to make sure that we consider it prominently in our design and roadmap for the StreamServer. While the StreamServer enables capabilities that address the challenge of social scaling it is worth considering in the context of an organizations overall information architecture. We are at the beginning stages of understanding the profound consequences of pervasive networked information. As always.... more later.

Our last blog entry, many months ago touched on the debate around "Enterprise RSS".

Ironically, as I write now, months later, the topic has surfaced once more with a few twists. James Dellow links to many of the sources in his recent post "The Nonsense of Enterprise 2.0" Its interesting to see all this discussion right now. We took a few months off from posting to the site and observed while we focussed on our second generation platform - the Attensa StreamServer for managed syndication services or what has been called Enterprise RSS. While we think the term Enterprise RSS is flawed it has taken on meaning for many.

The recent discussion encompasses the topic of Enterprise 2.0 generally as well as "Enterprise RSS". See Marshall Kirkpatrick's post "If you think RSS is Dead Then That's Your Loss and It's a Big One" or the recent post by Stewart Mader "Return on Adoption: Help People Solve Business Problems". When RSS is mentioned specifically in these debates my observation is that for the most part, those who promote the benefits of RSS in the enterprise are focussed on the business results that can be delivered by leveraging RSS to connect people, business applications and information. It seems that the antagonists are often focussed on specific tools or approaches that they as early adopters are using. For example, RSS is dead because live twitter activity streams are better.... These trends from the leading-edge are relevant but they are not determinant with regard to matters inside the enterprise.

If we are talking about enterprise software (and we are) as opposed to individual adoption, the focus of the debate needs to move from technology to business results. While opinions appear to differ, the discussions seem to be evolving in this direction. Accordingly, it seems like a good time to use the debate as context to introduce our new product and to look at XML/RSS syndication though the lens of business problems, opportunities and ROI.

Consider the importance of information management, knowledge sharing and collaboration strategies to business execution, competitiveness and innovation. This has led to large investments of resources and capital into information solutions. Unfortunately, the very systems implemented to enable these strategies are now creating obstacles for achieving the desired results. This is because the proliferation networked information and the sheer number of systems with frequently changing data are creating significant challenges to finding, monitoring and sharing relevant information.

More importantly, while information systems are critical, it is people not systems, that make business decisions, sell and service customers, innovate new products and execute strategy. If they can not effectively utilize information systems these critical business functions suffer. We are inadvertently turning our most important assets - knowledge workers - into inefficient "hunters and gatherers" rather than "cultivating farmers" of information.

The key to all of these business benefits is not the technical methodology behind the solution but the fact that there is timely, contextual delivery of information relevant to the business activity at hand. If this was accomplished with two paper cups and a string the business value is significant. Don't get me wrong, RSS approaches to information delivery are very important. What I am saying is they have value because of what they enable within the business context. Two cups and a string or email for that matter can not effectively unite business applications, social applications and the users that need the information.

The problem of harnessing information and knowledge contained in business organizations is expensive and getting more challenging. These problems are not solved by monolithic systems, email, IM or traditional portal approaches. But there are applications, usage patterns and best practices emerging that leverage RSS in very powerful ways. That seems like the appropriate focus of the discussion at this stage.

From a solution perspective, managed RSS/XML syndication strategies offer unique benefits. For one, these strategies are inherently standards based and leverage other systems. By making the information that an organization already has more accessible and enabling users to share insights or knowledge across systems and information sources each system in the network becomes more valuable. This can take the form cross pollenating information between users and systems based on context or it can be as simple as enabling highly personalized information dashboards that span different systems and deliver highly relevant, channelized information to users. These dashboards can be even embedded in the existing systems themselves making it transparent to most users.

Interestingly, Gartner breaks RSS in the enterprise out and recently moved it out of the trough of disillusionment and up the slope of enlightenment. Elllen Feaheny has a post about this recently titled Gartner: Wikis and Enterprise RSS on the “slope of enlightenment”. I think this signals less generalization and more consideration of mapping products to solutions. All involved should welcome that.

In the prior post, describing what was necessary to move this thing people call "enterprise rss" forward I observed that "[t]he heavy lifting of this challenge lies with the vendors and solution integrators to create solutions that facilitate natural user adoption, address enterprise information management challenges and produce immediate value." For Attensa what this meant was the development of our second generation server product - the Attensa StreamServer. The StreamServer is both a natural evolution of the prior Attensa FeedServer as well as a substantially new platform with new capabilities across the spectrum of find, subscribe, publish and share.

It is no surprise based on that earlier post that the goals for the StreamServer were quite clear. It had to be easily implemented, encourage natural adoption and complement systems and information sources already in in use. The StreamServer is also first and foremost an enterprise application with a focus on management, security, integration, availability and ease of deployment across large numbers of users.

Applications like the StreamServer are new tools for IT and business leaders to solve challenges today as well as address the opportunity presented by information abundance and workforces eager to embrace collaboration. Identify any initiative or activity in the organization and ask the question - would our results be better and/or more efficiently achieved if the people involved could more easily find and remain aware of the information they need and share insights throughout their work? That seems to me to be the crux of the matter rather than what we call it at any given time.

More to come...

Marshall Kirkpatrick has stirred things up for RSS followers with his post R.I.P Enterprise RSS on Read Write Web. As I write this, there have been 70 comments covering a range of viewpoints. Marshall's post is one of several recent perspectives relating to what is commonly called "enterprise RSS". The crux of Marshall's observation is that RSS has not been widely adopted by large organizations despite expectations a couple of years ago that RSS would be come a key enterprise tool.

Marshall's article is not an attack on the value of RSS. In fact, Marshall explains "[w]e love RSS and this makes us really sad. If much of the rest of the world wants to ignore this technology, though, it's their loss. It's our bread and butter. Neglecting RSS at work seems to us like pure insanity. He continues "[a] market without enterprise use of business class RSS readers is like a flock of sitting ducks. Any company that steps up to make serious strategic use of such software should be at an immediate advantage in terms of early and efficient access to information."

Hard to argue with any of those observations.

What is the take away? Maybe that it is still too early to stop the clock and call this one. Those of us that have lived life as early adopters and are old enough may remember colleagues making observations like "why do I need email if I can fax a letter?" In hindsight it seems obvious, but it was not to them at the time. Personal adoption led to business use and business use led to enterprise-class applications.

There are many factors contributing to the pace of adoption of RSS within the enterprise. The first question is whether or not everyone using the term "enterprise RSS" means the same thing? Glancing at the comments and generous ranting around the web the answer seems to be no. I also agree with Mike Gotta's observation that "Enterprise RSS is not a great label. RSS is a technology/protocol." At Attensa we view the category broadly as enabling enterprise-wide publish-subscribe networks that aggregate information from people and systems through the enterprise and channel it intelligently to the users that need it. These information networks substantially improve how organizations and their employees manage information and share knowledge. RSS is just one underlying standard that makes this flow possible.

There is collective wisdom in the comments that suggest the companies involved in the enterprise RSS space have focused on the technology and neglected or have done a poor job articulating the business applications and benefits of using feeds and channels to streamline communication and collaboration behind the firewall. In Attensa's case, I know we have been guilty. Those of us impressed with the potential of these new publish-subscribe paradigms are eager to talk about its capabilities from a technical perspective. We need to make sure we are emphasizing the business value that results from collaboration enabled business processes.

Enterprise RSS doesn't mean much. When vendors and solution providers emphasize secure communications channels that intelligently and automatically route relevant information to the people who need/want it, light bulbs start lighting up. Efforts such as the Enterprise RSS Day of Action organized by James Dellow are positive steps in the process of change. I hope those and new efforts continue.

Another factor impacting timing is that even forward thinking enterprise customers making decisions to implement these solutions face a fundamentally different and more complex decision. Many current RSS fans are free to try an application here, a service there, experiment and explore the possibilities. Be honest, how many twitter clients have you tried this year? Larger organizations obviously do not have that flexibility in their plans for thousands of users. In many ways, this thing we are calling enterprise RSS is one of the more complex solution components in the Web 2.0 family. As successes and best practices become more visible the pace of adoption will accelerate.

Another tactical consideration is that RSS exposes many information management problems that have arisen from the fact that most Web 2.0 applications are great at publishing but not so great at delivery. This is both an inhibiting technical issue (Chris Saad has an interesting post on the data portability blog). as well as a solutions implementation challenge. We are excited to see the emergence of firms with experience and focused expertise to provide overarching solution architectures. They are a big part of the answer.

While technical innovation will continue (and we have ours planned at Attensa) the immediate focus should be delivering coherent business solutions. With a healthy debate and increasing awareness driven by articles like Marshall's, solutions and common perspectives will emerge. The heavy lifting of this challenge lies with the vendors and solution integrators to create solutions that facilitate natural user adoption, address enterprise information management challenges and produce immediate value.

We agree that ignoring these important tools in the workplace "seems to us like pure insanity." The expectations of early adopters and innovators (present company included) is not necessarily the best determinant of when to assess the health of the market. It has been disappointing to many of us because we understand the potential. However, there have been many new technology trends that died from the disappointment caused by their own hype. I do not think that is happening here. Enterprise use of these tools is not dead it is evolving purposefully.

Thanks Marshall, I think I am going to need a few hours this weekend to read all the comments and links.