Andy Roberts DARnet

Distributed Action Research, communities of practice and social objects by Andy Roberts

organisation tagged articles

organisation description:

Enterprise RSS?

I’ve clearly got a lot to learn about Enterprise 2.o.  For example, what exactly is the point of standardising on one mandated brand of RSS reader software for every employee in an organisation?

In my understanding an RSS reader is a personal productivity tool, a way of organising the way a person works with their chosen reading matter. But people do not all consume information in the same way. Some like to organise everything into neat folders, others prefer to have everything in one big pile with the latest at the top. Some like to quickly scan through everything and then deal with the most important first, others prefer to work through their incoming notifications one at a time. You get the picture. There are also preferences for the style of presentation, because some people have different eyesight capabilities. For different folk, certain styles and coloured fonts work better than others or they need specific colour backgrounds to work from. Some like three panes visible at once, others a single paned window. Some work with one highly customised computer, others need to be able to log in from anywhere on a variety of machines.

So I can’t work out yet what would really be the problem facing an Enterprise IT department if people were allowed to choose for themselves which RSS reader they prefer to use. What are the benefits of standardisation, and to whom?

Tagged as: , , ,

Thanks for reading Andy Roberts articles tagged organisation on Darnet