A few weeks ago I wrote about adding connections between the three levels of information management, essentially showing how Step Two’s three level model sits in comparison to my 7 pillars reference architecture for collaboration. We need to extend the discussion by considering destination vs. aggregation.

Considering Destination
The idea of destination is that an intranet user clicks through to a certain page (or place) on their intranet, and reads the information that’s there, or works with the system that is accessible from there. For example:
– you want to see the current state of a team project, so you click through and open the main page of the project. You see what’s up, and create a task for a colleague to do.
– you want to read the latest news from your organization, so you go to the news page.
– you have to fill out a form on the intranet, so you click through to the appropriate place, and fill out the form!

In all cases, you go somewhere on the intranet — you visit a place. And the place you visit is often linked to the place where the information is stored.

In terms of the three levels, then, you go to the corporate places when you want corporate information, you go to the team, department or divisional places when you want that information, and you work within your own places when you are working on your own stuff. There’s a hard line between the various places.

Considering Aggregation
Under the idea of aggregation, information and happenings from across the three levels in the intranet are assembled and brought to the attention of the intranet user. The individual doesn’t have to navigate to each individual place to see what’s happening … those changes flow to them. For example:
– you go to the search page and type “competitors” (you start by going to a destination). When the result set is returned, you subscribe for future updates to that search string, and these flow to you automatically.
– you visit the home page for your team project, and subscribe for updates. Whenever something changes, notification of that change comes to you, and maybe even the full text of the change … so that you don’t have to visit at all.
– you want to read the latest corporate news from your organization, so you subscribe for updates. These flow to you as they happen, negating the need to go searching for them.

In all of these cases, you have transitioned from going somewhere to find information or doing something, to having the intranet feed back the information that is of interest to you.

A couple of observations:
– RSS is a key enabler of this aggregation. It’s time to give intranet users RSS clients, and to enable RSS on the intranet.
– RSS can be used for subscribing to specific “destination content” (eg, a specific news list or team site), or to “concept content” (eg, a search phase that crosses destinations, or a metadata value that is used across destinations). The difference is simple: the first gives all content from a particular place, and the second gives all content for a particular phrase, irrespective of place. To do this, you’ll need an enterprise RSS server that finds content and serves up re-combined content, eg, the Attensa FeedServer.

So What?
Offering aggregation capabilities on the intranet means that users can stay connected to what’s happening in the areas that impact or interest them, without requiring them to visit the appropriate destinations.

More importantly, the interests and navigation patterns of other users within the intranet can be used to reason out potentially interesting content to bring to the attention of specific users. In this way the social habits of intranet users as a collective can be used to benefit the individual.