Janet Johnson | The Art of Marketing

Charlene Li (the woman who, if she were a technology, would be RSS) is leaving Forrester on July 18. In her blog post “Why I’m leaving Forrester”, she explains she’s leaving after nine years because she’s needing more control over how she spends her time - especially with her family. Good for her.

I only hope she’ll keep her promise that she’ll stay involved in this space. I’m not at all ready for her to go.

She’s leaving a whole team of people in their San Francisco office - and I expect Jeremiah Owyang (whom I met years ago at an early Web 2.0 conference and have enjoyed watching him grow) will carry the torch well for her.

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I blogged very briefly awhile back about the way shipping company Wallem embraced Enterprise RSS. At the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference, Scott from Attensa was in the audience when Patrick Slesinger, CIO of Wallem, spoke of his simple implementation and integration with the K2 business intelligence platform. Scott published the presentation Patrick gave over on the Attensa blog.

Patrick’s key motivations for deploying the platform are fascinating to me. His four big challenges in developing an IT infrastructure for their floating contingent of vessels and personnel around the globe were:

• Making processes mobile
• Moving process away from terrestrial email
• Pushing information anywhere
• Measuring the real value of information

All are summed up by the notion of “getting the right information to the right people at the right time.”

But the most stunning revelation of the presentation, now that I can see it, is the savings passed along to Wallem’s customers as a result of better information tools leading to improved fleet management…

RSS and Black Gold

In two extremely important and obvious areas of expense, Wallem was able to deliver an 8% fuel oil savings for each of its 329 ships under management. That 8% translated to $394,800,000 annual savings. And they were able to save 6% of each ship’s annual lube oil expenditures - generating another $11,844,000 in savings annually.

How?

The managed enterprise RSS system from Attensa, the Blackpearl BI system from K2 and Microsoft’s SharePoint portal combined to deliver these benefits:

• Increased visibility into systems and resources
• Mobile connected process and feedback loops
• Alignment of information and process, creating knowledge and value
• Better understanding of information required by: Who, What, When, Where and Why…

Imagine the relative ease of deployment, associated benefits and savings that one might discover by connecting any global (or even regional) enterprise’s people and systems through enterprise RSS - without having to rig it up for a floating, constantly moving fleet and personnel.

Mike Gotta, analyst at the Burton Group, and RSS and social media expert moderated the session and summed it up nicely:

“This is not the typical RSS application. That was great. I think it’s stunning how simple things can work so well.”

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I’ve been witness to quite a mental mindstorm brewing in my brain over the past few days, and it’s likely to consume my blog efforts for some time to come… (fair warning, or fantastic relief to my four or five regular readers.)

I attended my first non-high tech conference in years (where I wasn’t a speaker), the Drug Information Association’s (DIA) annual convention. There to represent the Academic Network, I was fortunate to research the state of the pharmaceutical industry’s online strategies; especially as consumers are flocking online to research medical conditions and the medicines they’re being prescribed.

Back to the Basics

What I found was quite surprising - for someone who recently declared 2008 to finally be the year of the business blog… the state of technology (and technical infrastructure) in pharma was pretty surprising.

Partly because of regulations, and I’m not sure what other excuses there are… but frankly I was appalled at the lack of IT infrastructure to do even the basics - like supporting remote work teams. (At least, assuming the session speakers I heard were representative.)

Some examples of issues I heard:

• Many Medical Liaisons (remote representatives of pharma companies) have no access to a shared knowledge base with internal Medical Information team members. An example of a “case study knowledge repository” was shown, but there were no search capabilities, no collaboration capabilities, nothing beyond a database of PDFs or templates. It was as if I was looking at an online portal from 2000.
• Many software representatives (Oracle, Microsoft and others were at the show) had no real notion of allowing their vertical tools to accept web-based information via XML and RSS. When I tried to describe why one might want to poll online communities for potential Adverse Events (something pharma has to monitor and report to the FDA on a strictly regulated basis); I got blank stares.
  • Meanwhile, according to JupiterResearch, the top three reasons people congregate online are:
    • To see what other consumers say about a medication or treatment (36%)
    • To research other consumers’ knowledge and experiences (31%)
    • To learn skills or get education to manage a condition (27%)

Between Rocks and Hard Places…

The panel I was most looking forward to, (and delighted to find it at the show) was titled “Drug Information, Wikipedia and Google Scholar: Implications for Medical Information.” It was both frightening and enlightening at the same time. I Twittered my thoughts as the thing was unfolding… but to net it out:

Frightening: Hearing panelists scoff at the lack of viability of Wikipedia because it’s not scientifically reviewed, yet having them be unwilling (or unable) to correct inadequacies themselves. Even when it comes down to correcting a “simple” edit like changing an inaccurate method of drug delivery - from “oral” to some other method. If they change one heinous error, does that mean the rest of the article is correct by implication?

Enlightening: Because of the advent of WikiScanner in August, 2007, even anonymous entries can be tracked to an IP address and attributed to an organization. Examples were shown where organizations (Diebold and others) altered Wikipedia entries “anonymously” and were later outed for doing so in Wired. The last thing these public companies, tightly regulated by the FDA (ugh, those poor people and their systems… more on that later), want is to be publicly derided for anonymous changes.

Meanwhile, look where most consumers go to find information about medical conditions online:

So my new crusade is to do two things: help enlightened health care organizations safely enter the Health 2.0 space (while trying to stay patient - no pun intended), and to help those of us poor schlubs who are out there looking for information to find the most accurate, up-to-date information possible.

It’s a big job, but somebody has to do it. I welcome all the help I can get…

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I got an email two days ago from someone I didn’t recognize - Lauren Cook. It started like this:

Hi Janet,

My name is Lauren and I’m the Editor at BeThree.com….

And I thought to myself - wow. How cool is that? I blog about one of my favorite newsletter articles, and the person who wrote it actually reached out to thank me…

…thank god you liked the “poop smoothie” description (because when writing it, I second-guessed myself about a million times… “am I REALLY saying this????”).

People wonder whether they’ll be able to spend the necessary time a blog really takes in order to thrive. It’s things like this - connecting with someone you’d never imagine you could - that has kept me firmly in the game blogging for more than 4.5 years.

And I’m not alone. According to a Universal McCann study published recently (via MediaPost), among adults 18-34, social media now is the dominant form of personal communication media, with 85% relying on one or more Web 2.0 platforms to stay in touch with others.

“Although age is the driving force behind usage patterns of these technologies, it is clear that a fundamental shift has taken place in all of our lives about what it means to communicate in the 21st Century.”

This fundamental shift has happened, in large part, because of what I’ve just experienced. Surprising connections, enabled by social media (and those people who are smart enough to watch the web for mentions of their brand via RSS).

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In a case of severe understatement, I read an article in CIO Asia magazine that quoted Wallem Shipping CIO Patrick Slesinger as saying:

“There’s enough problems controlling and managing IT infrastructure when you know precisely where it is,” says director and CIO Patrick Slesinger, “let alone when it is constantly moving at sea.”

Oh, yeah.

Wallem is a ship broker and ship management company with more than 8,000 employees in 21 countries. Wallem gives shippers full, on-line access to things like procurement records, accounting and personnel records for their ships. Patrick has developed quite a system to do so. He uses Attensa’s managed RSS platform to immediately notify employees, ship owners and service providers when their ships change their itinerary - due to weather, etc. That way, employees needing to work the ship would immediately know whether there would be a delay. And if service providers needed to change their plans, they’d know as well. It’s really quite an amazing system.

Four years ago, I worked for a company with the BC Ferries system as their client. They used RSS in a similar way. Because so many people in the BC area relied on the ferry system to get to work, people were able to subscribe to the BC Ferries web site and get service notices delivered to their PDA’s or email when ferries were delayed, etc.

One of the most innovative uses of RSS by BC Ferries was to constantly update how many people were waiting at the dock to board the ferries - you could always tell how full the ship was by how full the parking deck was. And every time a car passed through the parking gate, an attendant would send a count from her Blackberry to the web, where it was reflected in a graphic of how full the parking deck was. It was a very cool mashup (I actually just typed maship, which I rather like) at the time.

Somehow these shipping guys know how to use RSS to get the right information to the right people at the right time, no matter where the information originates. Like a rippling tide.

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