Cliff Bell came to a somewhat shocking realization last year: The two most important Internet software applications in recent history—e-mail and Web browsers—were failing his company. Overwhelmed by e-mail and lacking the time and energy to surf the company’s intranet for important information, employees simply weren’t getting the information they needed to do their jobs. "People often don’t check [an intranet] landing page," says Bell, who is CIO of Phoenix Technologies, a maker of electronics components for PC motherboards. "And if you send them an e-mail, it’s not often read."

But Bell did notice that "blogs get traction." That led him to explore Really Simple Syndication (RSS), a new model for keeping employees, customers and business partners up to date, one that pushes relevant information to them via subscription rather than relying on their ability to find the information. For example, Phoenix’s legal team uses RSS for legal review, mixing RSS subscriptions with internally generated feeds for specific projects. With RSS, the lawyers no longer have to trawl through e-mail or the intranet to find out what’s going on with a particular project; they can rest assured that if something new happens, they will hear about it. The result is a common, instantaneous channel for legal staff to share information and add their own comments to it. Bell envisions the use of departmental or project-based RSS feeds throughout the company, as well as a common corporate channel for companywide announcements.

Beyond the News

Best known as the delivery technology for many blogs and for content sites such as Yahoo and USA Today, RSS formats messages in XML for delivery over a network or the Internet to a reader—an e-mail program, Web browser or dedicated application—that displays the messages much like e-mail or a webpage. But RSS is based on a subscription approach, where recipients decide which message feeds they want delivered, and RSS includes filtering capabilities (for example, a subscriber may specify that only stories related to mergers and acquisitions in a legal newsletter should be sent) to keep received messages on target. It’s that filtered, subscription approach that enterprises can take advantage of to create a communications channel that recipients consider useful.

CIOs who are pushing the original definition of RSS are doing so in two primary ways: One is inside the enterprise, to create ad hoc groups that can subscribe to and comment on the same core information, whether for engineers working on a new design or HR staff analyzing the latest standards and regulations. The second method is to focus outside the enterprise by using RSS to deliver custom information that partners and customers subscribe to, such as the ongoing status of an order or transmitting current customer leads to distributors.