I’ll be at a conference over the next few days, so hopefully I’ll be able to get a few good ideas up here. The most interesting thing I’ve heard in the first presentation, from a General from the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, is that our current information infrastructure forces our soldiers to do their own information integration because they have to deal with so many different communications networks.
I feel that this has universal applicability: when providers of information work in siloes and provide information through proprietary or specialized distribution channels, then we are forcing consumers of information to do their own integration by tracking down information from many different channels. Likewise, when organizations don’t provide the proper tools (read: RSS distribution) to aggregate information, they are doing their people a disservice and hurting efficiency.
I think this common channel (RSS) distribution of information is a key, and often overlooked, benefit of Web 2.0. I wish (and as of now I cannot) get my information via RSS feed. I’m forced to navigate the corporate intranet and find my own information, rather than getting what I need delivered to my reader or even my inbox. And as anybody who has set up a lot of feeds in a reader will tell you, you can gather information much more efficiently if you don’t have to go all over the place to check for new content.
