Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Drinking From A Firehose is Nothing New

Every manager likes productivity gains, don't they. That's why multi-tasking is almost a job requirement these days. But does multi-tasking lead to increased productivity? Alec Saunders reports on recent reports that when a knowledge worker is interrupted by an email or call, it can take as long as 15 minutes for them to get back into the work they were doing. It was with interest that I saw Sam Seti of Vecosys cover the evolution of RSS feeds being turned into voice feeds. With this new service from HearMeAnyWhere the content provider gets a phone number and subscribers ring that number to get the feed as Text To Voice. Another company KnowNow has launched itself into the big time RSS-In-The-Enterprise space, landing over $12m in funding. KnowNow seem to be positioned as "information flow through RSS control" but that you can control that flow through subscribing to the flow (think of it as persistent search within the enterprise). The "push" element of KnowHow's Enterprise RSS should be of interest to anyone that is looking to move to the next level in their outbound email campaigns. As employees are "subscribing" to feeds with similar "tag clouds", it might also be possible to uncover previously submerged social networks within the company, and between the company and its ecosystem of suppliers, partners and customers. What all this is crying out for is some measure of "Return on Attention". Call centres and customer service managers have known for years that they need the right information in front of the agent to close out a customer query within the first call. In this instance, Return on Attention would be measured as the return on the systems and processes that you have installed to enable your agents to close out more calls within the first interaction. It might be worth while checking out Teqlo to see how their new RSS feed management modules might simulate a KnowNow functionality, and then you could trial and pilot how RSS feeds could be best sculpted to your real needs.

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3 comments:

Sam Sethi said...

Return of Attention as opposed to Return of Investment is going to be a key metric in the future. RightMarketing are already using this term with their customers.

TouchStone are already developing an Attention Brokerage and there are a few others in the pipeline.

Unknown said...

Thanks Sam, that is really useful information. I know you have been following this and the Open ID developments with great interest. I will certainly check out the Attention Brokerage concept....

Jeff Nolan said...

Hi Paul,
Thanks for the mention. I’ve been a little cautious about the RSS stuff we are doing because I don’t want to be referred to as “like Pipes”, but I can’t deny there are some really interesting applications that could develop out of the widget catalog we are putting together.

Regardless, the enterprise RSS stuff is welcome and will add a lot of value to companies that are staring down a lot of important information that is locked up in systems not easily accessed.

Get your twitter mosaic here.