Interesting - it seems as if Michael Rudnick, Watson Wyatt's Global Intranet and Portal Practice Leader, has started a blog - Employee Portals 2.0. Toe in the water time - it's a blogger blog, hosted on blogspot, and not referring to WW, but the fact that he's taken the first step further demonstrates blogging's penetration into the world of professional service firms. I expect this trend to accelerate rapidly in 2006.
His first substantive entry describes some basic and fairly well known internal uses for RSS, such as delivering HR communication. While this distribution of generic information is, of course, of value, I'm starting to think that there are many interesting uses beyond this, particularly when RSS and personalisation start being mashed up. I touched on this use back in January - RSS and aggregators protect against phishing, but the internal use cases are just as interesting. Providing a personalised RSS feed from, for example, a total rewards site (or HR site) would provide quick and efficient delivery of vital info, without requiring an employee to visit the site. Stock plan value updates, pension plan updates, back end administrator query resolutions/updates, targeted communications, etc.
Of course, getting an employee to subscribe in the first place will be a challenge, but if we imagine a reasonably well developed internal RSS consumption infrastructure, then injecting these feeds into an employee's personal aggregator should be possible.
The other thing that sprung to mind was that identity confirmation is going to become even more important, both for ensuring that people get only the feeds they are entitled to, but also to ensure that people who start blogs are who they say they are. This doesn't mean that I think it isn't Michael Rudnick blogging, but it did occur to me that it would be easy to set up a blog in someone else's name, and do some damage to their reputation.
And with that thought - have a great Christmas - I'm in Quebec looking forward to getting some decent snowboarding done, and looking at the mounds of snow outside, I think I've a good chance !
Technorati Tags: internal, RSS
social media, web 2.0, intranet consulting | anu gupta
Excellent. Another consulting compatriot!! I'll look forward to seeing his content.
Excellent. Another blogger who focuses on the bigger picture and implications of blogging, rss, etc. on the culture of organizations. Am actually also going through your blog list that has some other really good links to good blogs. Thanks.