Legal Research

It?s not just about RSS readers

By scott

“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.”

Marshall Kirkpatrick at the excellent Readwriteweb has written what amounts to an obituary for enterprise RSS, or at least enterprise-specific RSS readers, saying “it looks to us like the demand simply never arose and that market is over.”

Is this really true? or are we just asking the wrong question about RSS.

Is the widespread presence of - what we would regard as - ‘rss readers’ within an organisation a good gauge of whether or not that organisation and those within it are using RSS? I don’t think it is. Whilst organisations may not be adopting ‘a business class RSS reader’, many have adopted Office 2007 and or IE7 and 8 and have members of staff using those to deliver their feeds - and in the case of Office 2007 - into the receptacle that means the most to them - their Outlook inbox.

MK says “We suspect that many people who combine email and RSS don’t know how to use either, but we are totally open to being convinced otherwise. It seems to us that in order to effectively manage feeds they should live outside of email, as the two mediums are very different.”

Surely this depends on the individual and how they work? How many feeds to they subscribe to? How many emails do they get a day? Do they live in their Blackberry, or always sit at their desk? As it happens, I do prefer to keep my feeds outside of my email application, but just because I do, doesn’t mean everyone else does, or indeed should.

I know a growing number of organisations using feeds or combinations (mash-ups) of feeds who are displaying these on intranets as updates for their employees or groups of employees. These are invariably created and managed by library and information, BD, and marketing and communications staff to help keep their employees in the know about certain topics/developments. So the use of RSS is - I would argue - growing quite rapidly within the enterprise, even if is not always at an individual level. Those involved in information provision, business development, competitive intelligence and marketing and communications are more often than not using RSS and RSS readers - whether web-based or company sanctioned - to deliver strategic advantage to their organisations.

In the field of law, the fact that Westlaw, Lexis, PLC and others have all launched RSS capability for the delivery of their updates/saved searches etc in the past few months, I think demonstrates that they are ware of its importance and are - in these cases - responding to pressure for users to offer RSS.

The question is who needs to use the resulting feeds. In some sectors, such as the legal profession, many lawyers have enough problems reading all their emails, without also navigating their way through loads of rss feeds each day. It is their business service staff - such as librarians, BD, and marketing people who they use as ‘their filters’ to identify what it is they need to know. Obviously, this is never going to be as effective as a lawyer doing it themselves, but most do not have to time or inclination to do so, and having a business class RSS reader at their disposal would do little or nothing to change that view; so others effectively act as their human business class RSS reader, doing so as part of a continuing provision of effective current awareness services.

So, are enterprise-specific RSS readers dead? I think if you look at it expecting huge multinational companies to all buy and roll out Newsgator’s or Attensa’s enterprise product to all their staff, then they may be - as least if that is not part of a wider, and more integrated adoption of an enterprise 2.0 strategy. Sadly, most companies have already signed on the Microsoft dotted line, so will take what Microsoft can offer for free as opposed to paying for something additionally which they percieve as serving the same purpose.

One thing is for certain, and that is that RSS use within the enterprise is alive and well and is - I believe - set to continue to grow rapidly over the next 12 months.

Full post as published by Information Overload on January 13, 2009 (boomark / email).