Newsgators made a recent press release on RSS enabling Enterprise Content, don't see too much talk about it in the blogsphere,but I think its a very important one, excerpt of the release:

NewsGator Technologies, Inc., the leading RSS company, today announced an OEM agreement with /n software, makers of RSSBus. The partnership will enable enterprises to access content from databases, business applications, spreadsheets and directories and deliver it through NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES). Under the terms of the agreement, NGES customers will be able to quickly convert data from dozens of sources into RSS feeds that can be accessed via the Web, portals, e-mail clients, desktop applications and mobile devices.

Sometime back I was checking out Yahoo pipes, As I played around with it , I couldn't help but wonder how great it would be if this was available within the enterprise, but soon to realise that a host of data connector / sources will need to be built into it before it can be leveraged within the enterprise,

Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code.

Than recently I came across a post about a similar solution that is available / focused within the enterprise called PROTO (Haven't had a chance to test it out)

Proto is an application for building "desktop mashups". Using our visual building environment, you can combine web services like Yahoo! Maps and Salesforce.com with desktop apps, like iTunes and Outlook. Build complete "composite apps" in under an hour, and drop into the VBA IDE when you need to write a little code.

Put simply, Proto is the glue.

Putting all this together I couldn't help but wonder - "Are these the parts of the Enterprise Information Ecosystem of the future?", Which would cater to all the information gathering, distributing and compilation needs of the enterprise, below is a simple block diagram highlighting a possible view of the same:


Now lets give this some context, in a recent survey conducted by Accenture for Middle level managers in US/UK the results were:
1. Managers spend up to two hours a day searching for information, and more the half of it has no value to them (this echoes the finding of a survey done for knowledge workers by IDC a couple of years ago).
2. 59% miss valuable information that exists in their company as a result of poor information distribution.
3. 42% say they accidentally use the wrong information at least once a week.
4. 45% said gathering information about what other parts of their company are doing is a big challenge (only 31% said the same is true for their competitors).
5. 57% say that having to go to numerous sources to compile information is a difficult aspect of managing information for their jobs.

For the purpose of this post lets focus on points 2,4 & 5....The points to note are GATHERING INFORMATION, POOR INFORMATION DISTRIBUTION & COMPILING INFORMATION FROM NUMEROUS SOURCES.

Source: 1, 2

Prashanth Rai