As enterprise businesses look into Really Simple Syndication (RSS) as a legitimate tool, they will find that their visions of what this technology can do for them clouded by the trivial capabilities of products currently available on the market.  

Too Much Information 

The Internet is one of the most important areas for enterprise businesses today and it is perhaps the most used resource of any enterprise (when compared to the use of any other communication resource including phone, pager, television, radio, etc.). Thanks to the Internet, enterprise employees can email anyone in the world as well as take advantage of unfettered access to global, regional, and local news and information. However, for all its benefits, the Internet is also perhaps the single largest time waster among enterprise employees. There is just too much information out there that by in large is often more interesting (or distracting) than the work that needs to occur in the office. 

Internet search engines reduce “some” of this wasted time by helping us increasingly locate the information we are looking for or provide clues where we might find it (if it even exists). While Internet search engines continue to improve, they cannot escape a number of obstacles standing their way to become run away successes: 

• They require users to go to them and interact with them
• They don’t own any of the content that they provide access to
• Content owners do not like sharing advertising revenue

Search engines require people to access the Internet, type in the URL of the search engine (which hopefully they know by name), and then type in what the user is looking for and then attempt a search using the selected search engine. If the search is unsuccessful, the user must refine their search and repeat this process until they either find what they are looking for or exhaust their search options and give up – potentially going to yet another search engine and repeating the entire process because unfortunately not all search engines index the same content and some even charge content owners to index them (I’ve never understood Yahoo’s and other pay for inclusion search engine philosophy as it is essentially biting the hand that feeds them). If you think about it this way, Internet search engines have short use cycle. Today search engines are better than staring the Internet face to face and trying to make sense of it all. However in the future, Internet search sites will likely be the last resort of Internet searches rather than what we see today in that they are often the first option. While for the foreseeable future there will be a need for Internet search engines, Internet search engines won’t always be the first place one goes to look for content. RSS will be instrumental in this paradigm change because instead of people going to search for content, the content that people most want will come directly to them in the form they are looking for bypassing the need for Internet search engines. The reason for this paradigm shift is because RSS is mindful of the needs of content owners which much prefer customers coming directly for their content rather than spring boarding off some Internet search engine. 

Local vs. Internet searching…a step in the right direction… 

It is scary to think that the last place you tend to look for something is right under your nose. Enterprise businesses should know this and if they don’t, well then shame on them for not exploiting it. Regardless, if you take a quick poll of enterprise employees, nearly all of them have their default browser page set up to access Google, MSN, or Yahoo rather than a search engine provided by their friendly IT department to search enterprise assets. Enterprise employees rely on Internet search engines to find the information they are looking for and when they find it they store this information on their hard drives, bookmark it, or worst – they store it in their personal folders on a shared network drive. This exercise results in a lot of wasted network hard drive space due to enterprise’s failure to emphasize local searches before searching the Internet. Very few enterprise employees search enterprise archives or network drives for the information they seek and still fewer even think that what ever information they are looking for would be located somewhere within their company’s network. Instead, they waste company time looking for information that already exists, only to further waste company resources saving additional copies of the same information. So even though all these people work for the same company and have all these things in common, they all initially reach for the Internet search engines instead of their company’s IT department. 

Because of complex page ranking algorithms within Internet search engines or requirements that websites pay to be listed in these Internet search engines, content owners prefer to speak directly to their customers. Listing RSS feeds on their websites is the first realistic way that content owners can effectively circulate their untainted content among their customers without the need to pay advertising on Internet search engines to drive page views or pay to be listed. 

You may have noticed that many search engines have recently come out with personal search toolbars that can be installed on your computer, index content stored on your hard drive, and then when you search for things your results will include local as well as Internet based matches (from the Internet search engine’s website). Apple’s newest release of its X operating system (named Tiger) also does a much better job of indexing files and provides a powerful search capability to find these files. Microsoft’s Vista promises to host similar improvements in local searches as well. But what is missing in all these one-off search solutions is “the big picture” – how can people find the information they seek without duplication and without wasted valuable company time searching. The answer is – it doesn’t yet exist! 

All this great technology and information is available today, yet all we have are these crude search tools. Until such tools materialize, we all must leverage a combination of local and enterprise searches, RSS, and the fall back link to an Internet search engine in order to find the information we need. 

Where does RSS fit in?

Interestingly, RSS is more than just a distributor of syndicated content. Operating systems like Apple and Microsoft are starting to see the light - that RSS can bypass search engines and go directly to content owners to retrieve information as it happens. Remember, Internet search engines do not index things immediately. While they often refresh sites that host constantly changing content, they will always be a few or more steps behind RSS. With RSS your need for an Internet search engine becomes greatly diminished as RSS delivers the information you are looking for at nearly the moment it happens. One of the few elements not yet settled is how users determine which feed or feeds they want to follow. With millions of feeds to choose from even this is becoming a daunting task. Enter your friendly IT department. 

Many of today’s enterprises will become tomorrow’s RSS aggregators for their employees. By becoming an RSS aggregator, they only have to poll each desirable RSS document once for all employees of the company at whatever frequency is suitable for the content – on very popular feeds this is a major savings in bandwidth. Becoming an RSS aggregator allows enterprises to weave their own syndicated content into the mix. Such as announcing company functions, recognizing individuals, circulating the closing of new deals, introducing new employees, or even changes to employee benefits. RSS has the potential to replace many of the undesirable functions of email while at the same time allowing IT to totally structure the content received by enterprise employees while shaping and forming the information that is most critical to the company. For example, if enterprise business development is focused on watching certain competition or perhaps precarious suppliers in order to explore new directions for the company; other pertinent departments may too benefit in the wealth of such observance. It is like if you give everyone the same tools and the same information and allow them to organize or filter it how they want to use it the result allows the overall organization to work more as a team, be more informed, and become more focused around similar goals. 

Search engines are “personalized” which is great for individual users, but promotes inequality for enterprises as each person has different search skills which yields quite a range of search results. If you are searching for “what’s for dinner” a range of responses is great, but if you are searching for something more important (such as potential take over targets) a range of different information can be problematic for enterprises. Consistency and timely information are major selling points of RSS to enterprise. Note that RSS can be personalized too, however where it differs from Internet search engine personalization is that IT can provide each and every desktop with similar information no matter how novice or skilled the user. 

RSS aggregator should be on IT’s near term budget 

The keys to RSS aggregation becoming mainstream is the need for company wide focus and collaboration on projects. Similarly, cities and educational institutions will become RSS aggregators for content most suited to the populations of individuals they serve while they too weave into this content their syndicated elements such as open gym hours, spring practice times, town meetings, fireworks times, recent hiring or retirements, service outages, holiday garbage collection, voting hours, poll results, etc. Such information alone would barely be worth a website to post it, however through RSS it can easily be integrated into the very system it resides without the need to post it statically. Once more people get the hang of receiving information as it happens (rather than looking for static information or worst yet, waiting for static information to be updated), they will opt for RSS. 

Learning about what we frequently want and then proactively searching for RSS feeds related to that information will enable consumers to enjoy immediate access to the content they most look for without the need to go back to the Internet search engine. Just as Walmart et al carefully watches what people buy and posses a wealth of information about items being purchased and how to maximize convenience to customers while leveraging as many other potential products along a consumer’s route to get the items they most frequently need, the same methodology could be applied to users searching for information. Give users the information they most frequently seek along with other related things or even better, provide this information within a kinder, gentler, non-commercialized environment and you will have the perfect enterprise RSS solution. 

Besides the obvious lack of enterprise search solutions with embedded RSS technology that seems to be missing today, there is also a need for standardization around RSS feed metadata as well as content metadata in general. Tomorrow’s content needs to be able to adapt to be downloaded, played, and displayed on either a computer screen, a television monitor, or wireless handheld. We need to have a proven way to enforce what ages can see what content and make the enforcement of content rating and usage rights trivial for device and application developers to implement. 

While there will always be a need to search for content, the real need (the one not often spoken) is that of individuals for information. For it is timely access to readily available information that helps us work, makes us smarter, and ultimately raises the value of the enterprise in which we work. Isn’t that what Information Technology (IT) is all about? 

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