The problem however is not a technology market problem, it's a change management and cultural problem. When I ask an audience (and I nearly always ask this question of my speaking audiences) how many have gone to My Yahoo! or iGoogle and customized a home page, approximately 10% of those people raise their hands. Additionally, I can tell you that of those 10 people in a hundred, only 1 or 2 actually use those sites with regularity. The numbers for personalized intranet portals are similar, though the use rate of those that have personalized a home page is higher (additionally, the adoption rate by IT and techies is very high... but the average employee is far from a techie).
The reason for the low adoption rate is because the average user does not see any value in taking the time to learn the technology. And frankly, the usual response is, “It's too technical for me.”
“Some readers have said that "RSS" is too technical and won't be adopted by people until we call it something else,” says Kilpatrick. “As a person with no technical background, I don't buy that.”
You can forgive Kilpatrick for his naivete as he doesn't do the user and employee research that we do at Prescient Digital Media (don't get me wrong, I have no problems with writers and in fact he's a fine one. However, he doesn't have access and hands-on experience to the dozens of intranet clients and other organizations that we have access to). It is though a mixed “technical” and “cultural” barrier; though technically not hard to personalize a home page, it does require some learning and experimenting that people won't do if they 1- don't have the time, and 2- don't see the value in it because they don't understand it.
“(RSS) is interesting in that it does call out a dark truth - enterprise adoption of feed syndication tools has been lacking,” writes Mike Gotta in his blog entry Ten Reasons Why "Enterprise RSS" Has Failed To Become Mainstream. Mike underlines a number of key reasons why RSS has failed so far, not the least of which are:
Employees may not know about feed readers and feed syndication (an awareness, education and training issue)
Employees may be unwilling to change their behaviors to take advantage of feed readers (if they have been rolled out)
Intranet web site owners have not made their sites "RSS friendly"
So while IT deparments are not providing the infrastructure and content owners are not making their sites RSS friendly, neither will do so until employees see and understand the value of RSS. Unfortunately, if you ask an audience of 100 communications, HR and marketing people to define RSS, maybe 3 or 4 can provide a salient answer. If management doesn't get it, employees won't get it.
There is however a silver lining: employees do understand Facebook, and other social media platforms. Once they realize that you can apply the same technology that drives Facebook “feeds” inside the organization, they'll start to see the value (approximately 90% of those under 40 in North America are now Facebook members; and its XML / RSS that is the technology that makes Facebook so outrageoulsy popular and successful).
“I think it will take about two years before we see it (RSS become mainstream) unfortunately,” says Gotta. “That said, I have always felt that feed syndication platforms constitute the backbone for social software/Enterprise 2.0 tools. This space remains one of the most critical architectural areas for enterprise strategists - it touches on everything organizations are doing with blogs, wikis, tagging and social bookmarking systems, and social networking.”
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