Successful Projects

As a consultant I get paid to provide answers and advice to my clients. Unlike some other consultants I strive to make sure that when I give advice it is based on common sense and in language that my clients can understand. To me doing the right thing for my clients means removing the shroud of mystery that other consultants seem to think makes them appear smart and indispensible. I want my clients to be self-sufficient not dependent on me – I think this respect for them breeds greater respect for me and sets me apart from others in the industry.

One bit of advice I’ve been giving clients lately is on the use of a technology called RSS. This is a relatively new technology that is sweeping the internet and causing a lot of buzz. At the same time, there is a definite lack of clear, concise information about exactly what RSS is and why a non-geek would even care. So I have found myself having to explain to my clients what RSS is in terms that they can understand so they can see why it is of benefit to them.

Here is what I’ve been telling them:

RSS is kind of like Publisher’s Clearing House – except without the sweepstakes. You know when you get the big envelope and you open it up and there are all these stamps representing the many publication you can get from Publisher’s Clearing House? Well RSS is kind of like that. It is a way to subscribe to all manner of content – news, sports, politics, stock quotes, weather, lifestyle, technology, etc. – and have it delivered to you. The power in this is that because there are companies out there that search, index and aggregate this content and serve it up – in most cases for free or a small fee – the user doesn’t have to spend his or her time wading through the morass that is the internet. These aggregators do all the work for you and, in most cases, they rate the content based on relevancy using sophisticated algorithms as well as subscriber/reader input.

Relevancy is important. Anyone who has ever done a search on an internet search engine knows that a lot of what is returned has nothing to do with what you’re really looking for. This means you can be fairly certain that if you go to an RSS aggregator’s site and do a search on say “SAP” instead of getting back 87,400,000 results most of which are companies selling SAP software and services like with Google you’ll get back maybe 20 results all of which will have been vetted for relevance to what you really care about – articles about SAP software.

Here’s a real world example. A very good friend of mine runs a company called MindWorks that specializes in helping companies that have purchased SAP make it fit and work in their environment. Until now they haven’t ever done anything with blogs or RSS – they’ve been busy doing what they do and haven’t had time to do the research like a lot of companies. But they have been subscribing to a couple of newsletters that come out every month or every other month. These are newsletters that contain synopses or sometimes just links to other sources of SAP industry news. This is info that is mostly relevant to the consultants at MindWorks but also to some of their customers. Trouble is that since the frequency of these newsletters is small and unreliable often the information contained in them is either irrelevant or obsolete.

I recommended to my friend that he build a blog for MindWorks that would be accessible by all of its employees – keep it internal to start and then open it up to customers once it has matured a bit – and use an RSS aggregator like NewsGator to search for and subscribe to sources of information that would be useful to MindWorks. Once these sources have been identified he can use the “Headlines” feature to create a page the aggregates all of this information into one place. It gets updated each and every time one of the blogs or websites adds or changes its content – often multiple times a day – and his employees are kept up to date with important information that is relevant and timely to their jobs.

I mocked this up for him in about 10 minutes – you can see it under the ForClients link on the Web/UI Design section of this blog – and with just a little bit more effort it could be branded to match the corporate website and even be added to the site so that it could be accessed via a discreet URL or a link.

It is this kind of application that is revolutionizing the way companies get access to the information they need to do their jobs better, make better and more timely strategic decisions and distinguish themselves from their competition to their customers.

Widespread adoption like this will move RSS out of the realm of the geek and into the wider world.

For more information on how your company can benefit from RSS email me at jsweet@sucessfulprojects.net.