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In several of my recent posts I have referenced Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo keynote, where I recall he talked about Enterprise 2.0 being about exposing the back office. I was curious to see if anyone else had picked up on that meme, and found little evidence of it, so I wondered if maybe I had misheard what he said. I went back and found the speech and picked up the exact quote:
Enterprise 2.0 means letting users into your back office,
Listen from 5:30 to 8:20 to hear his entire argument.
Sounds cool, so how does one actually go about doing this? I wondered the same thing. This is where serendipity and social networks come into play. About the same time I went to Web2Expo, I was catching up with a former colleague from GSK, Ralph James. It just so happens that Ralph currently works with a company that does exactly what O’Reilly was talking about, creating a simple access mechanism for back office data. That company is RSSBus.
From the RSSBus whitepaper Flattening the Information Landscape:
In his iconic book, “The World Is Flat”, Thomas Friedman lists the World Wide Web as one of the ten key world flatteners making a wealth of information available to anyone and everyone no matter where they live. He compares HTTP to the railroad track and HTML to the boxcar that carries information from everywhere to anywhere.
However, while HTML does a good job of presenting formatted pages of information to browsers, professional information providers know how difficult it is to extract the raw data from HTML for follow-up processing like filtering or merging - and this is only one of the limitations of today’s web: there are countless databases, news groups, personal mail files, text documents, and spreadsheets lurking throughout the network that are not served via HTTP. While most of these repositories can be accessed directly via SQL, Internet protocols or custom API’s, the inconsistency of access protocols and formats create a barrier to quick and seamless data access.
RSSBus is a suite of information access products that provide ready-to-use connectors to several dozen Internet and Enterprise information sources while hiding differences of data organization and access protocols. The RSSBus developer learns only one call mechanism, using it to access SQL databases, office documents, network protocols, message queues, email systems, news groups, blogs, financial services, web services like the ones from Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and FedEx, and dozens of other resources.
Check out their site for a more detailed description of their product and service. I, for one, think there is huge potential here for developing the next generation applications for creating customer value, the real objective of any enterprise.
