BusinessWeek has a great article today on Web 2.0 for Corporate America. One of their best points:

Corporations also are balking at installing big, multimillion dollar software programs that can take years to roll out—and then aren’t flexible enough to adapt to new business needs. “They’re clunky and awkward and don’t encourage participation,” grumbles Dion Hinchcliffe, chief technology officer of Washington, D.C. tech consultant Sphere of Influence.

Read the full article here.

Eight Media likes Management by Feeds:

But seriously we’re already so interrupted with our daily tasks and phone calls that this might be a perfect or near perfect solution. We get updated with the info we need when-we-need-it not during -were-doing-something-else. (from Another productivity booster)

Good point. I’ve been working on a new page at Squidoo about Management by Feeds, explaining a bit more how it works and how you can get it adopted into your business. It’s the new new way to get things done.

Here’s one of the cool things I love about Management by Feeds. I have a folder in NetNewsWire called “Sprout Companies”. This contains the blogs of all of our clients (that I know about). If there is a big event happening in the life on one of our clients, I know about it. Even if I don’t write to them, it makes me feel good to know that.

(For example, Omnidrive has had tremendous response to their new web-based storage solution. They are growing really fast. If you need to share files across the internet, you definitely need to give them a look.)

One thing we’ve learned since starting Sproutit is that personal touch one of the most precious commodities in the online. It seems like many people who start Web 2.0 companies are fascinated with the seemingly low costs of running a business. They can build a product for $10K, spend nothing on marketing, do support by email.

All of that is true and important, but you can’t use your website to hide from your customers. It may sound simple, but there is no better way to build a growing group of loyal customers than to simply become friends with them.

The fine folks at BlinkSale have quietly launched a massive upgrade to their excellent web-based invoicing system. If you like using simple web apps to run your business, if you bill clients and you manage by feeds, you have to give BlinkSale a try.

Over the weekend I received a couple of emails from JadedPixel in regards to Shopify now being in beta.

Coté at the People over Process blog has an interesting series going on about Management by Feeds in response to Marshall’s recent post here pointing out some of the areas that might make Management by Feeds difficult to adopt.

I have some strong opinions on the points Coté raises here that I plan to post a little later on once I have the time to write them, but in the mean time, check out his posts:

Part 1: Feed Filtering

Part 2: Getting Social Behind the Firewall

Part 3: The RSS Golden Hammer

My favorite quote so far:

we’re trying to use the software to strengthen the social bond that you would otherwise build face to face. As I said early on, this is one of my key understandings/desires of social software: a proxy and amplifier for what you would do face-to-face.

Managing by feeds, Chris is ready to get back to work.

[Marshall Kirkpatrick is fond of feeds. As the author of Weblogs Inc.’s Social Software Weblog, an interviewer and presenter with NetSquared and consultant for The Committee to Protect Bloggers , he is imminently qualified to speak not only on the benefits of feeds but possible obstacles. In this, our second in a series of guest-blogged posts, Marshall tackles potential bottlenecks in the process of management by feeds.]

I love RSS, absolutely love it. I love search feeds, enclosures, feeds displayed in HTML, filtered feeds, feeds bundled in OPML and IM notification of updated feeds. I love the flexibility of feeds. I really like the idea of management by feed as well, but I’m worried about two bottlenecks that challenge its viability. First, management by feed requires effective management of feeds and team members must be relied upon to document updates in a format available by feed.

My most sincere apologies for not having written sooner. I was (and still am) sick. Fortunately, I have mustered enough strength to write this blog post.

I have not been podcasting for simple reason of not wanting to cough through an entire episode. Don’t worry, I’ll be back soon.

Most importantly, I have not lost touch with the happenings of Sproutit. Why? Because we have adopted the concept of managing by feeds. Even while dealing with the side-effects of my meds, I was able to keep in touch with most all of the happenings within Sproutit. Sales, support, development, marketing, blogs (internal and external), logistics, etc… All managed through RSS feeds.

Now sing with me in the traditional Louis Armstrong style…”and I think to myself…..what a wonderful world.”

The latest Newsweek had the cover story, Putting the ‘We’ in Web. It was a good enough story as these things go, probably pretty informative for people who didn’t know much about Web 2.0, though a bit basic for those who work with it.

The problem is that, although they talked in a seven page article about MySpace, Dabble, Craigslist, Flickr and others, they mentioned RSS only once, briefly.

RSS lets you “subscribe” to targeted information from a Web service in the way you subscribe to magazines.

They don’t deal with the implications of RSS, just shunt quickly into APIs. The one thing all of these companies have in common is that they generate feeds. It’s interesting enough I suppose that you can see and use free photos on Flickr, but the real ground-breaking going on here is the ability to govern information, to bring it together into one place, in one interface, based on what you find important and useful.

Feeds are starting to gain real ground. It’s not just blogs that offer them, not even just other media like the New York Times. They are used in most of these new services and technologies. They allow the user to leave off the puttering around and cherry picking that a “post-scarcity world” of information requires.

Every product created by Sproutit, starting with Mailroom, has a feed. Soon, all of a companies business will be doable, or at least surveyable, within a feed reader.

That’s the real story.

Marshall Kirkpatrick over at the Social Software Blog (who I hear might be making a guest appearance on this blog soon) recently pointed us to the Moonwatcher Blog, which is the personal blog of Charlie Wood, who also formed an interesting company called Spanning Partners. Both sites are dedicated to covering the emergence of RSS in the Enterprise.

Its true, RSS as a technology is starting to creep into even big enterprise company’s plans. So how does RSS in the Enterprise relate to Management by Feeds?

RSS is a technology. It’s a way of publishing information. To use RSS, you need tools like Mailroom, Basecamp, and Spanning Salesforce to expose the data inside your company through RSS. Management by Feeds is how you use those feeds to make better decisions in less time.

Spanning Partners looks to be doing some important work in helping companies who have already spent the money to deploy big enterprise apps make information from those apps available through RSS. If you use Salesforce, in particular, its worth a look.

Today I am going to explain two principles about using technology in your business and then recommend one product you really need to use.

The first principle is that when it comes to using new technology in a business, your biggest challenge is not the technology, it is your people. Software like Mailroom can make the people in your business way more productive, but to get these advantages they must become less productive for a time while they learn how to use the new technology. Its hard to imagine productivity gains down the road when you feel the pressure to get work done now. If you don’t overcome this, people in your business simply will never adopt your new technology.

The key to solving this problem is to get fast results. Focus on adopting simple tools one at a time. Make sure people see productivity gains from each new tool within a day of effort or less and they’ll be much more likely to want to go along.

The second principle I want to talk about is documentation. If you have more than two or three people in your team, documenting some of the most common procedures and plans in your company is one of the best things you can do for your business. I can’t tell you how much time I have saved when hiring new people or bringing someone onto a project for the first time by simply being able to point them to some documentation and say “read this.” It saves both that person and me hours of back and forth, free us to spend our time on the meaty, more interesting parts of their job.

The perfect tool for this kind documentation is something called a Wiki. Wikis are tools that make it easy to build websites in a small team. If you’ve never used a wiki, you can go here for a little more information.

We use wikis at Sproutit to document everything from server deployment processes to marketing plans. People who get to know us often remark at how well organized we are. We are spread all over the world, yet everyone on our team generally has a good idea of what we are here for and where we are going next. All thanks to our wiki.

Anyway, the point is that wikis are obviously important, but in the past they’ve been pretty difficult to adopt. Most wikis have to be setup on your own server, which is both complicated and expensive. Hosted wiki services such as JotSpot don’t take any setup, but they come with so many features they are not easy enough to learn.

So, finally, my recommendation. Stikipad is a hosted wiki solution that appears to be built on the excellent open-source Instiki wiki package. The greatest strength of Instiki and Stikipad both is that they are both very easy to use and simple to learn. Stikipad goes beyond Instiki, adding better user management tools, a Word-like WYSIWYG writing environment, and it’s hosted so you can get up and running in no time flat. All the while remaining simple to learn and use.

Of course, Stikipad supports RSS feeds also that you can add to your feed reader for that sweet Management by Feeds love.

If you want to save time and keep your team in sync, use a wiki. If you ever hope to get your team to adopt wikis, use a service that is quick to setup, easy to learn, and delivers results fast.

In other words, go get a Stikipad account today. It’s good for you. (And it’s free too!)

I mentioned in a post a few days ago that I have 43 feeds in my Newsreader just dedicated to Sprout. Ken Yarmosh asked where I came up with those feeds and how we keep them organized. Chris answered that question. But then I thought maybe a few specifics about what feeds I use for Sproutit might be helpful to others wondering how they can use feeds in their business.

So here is a summary of the feeds I have for Sproutit:

Sproutit Internal – 17 feeds – These are feeds only shared by members of our team. I want to know about pretty much everything, so I subscribe to almost all of them.

• 1 feed for our CampaignMonitor account to keep track of how many people have signed up for our newsletter mailing list.
• 6 feeds from our website to keep up on new blog posts, comments and trackbacks to both the Big Act blog, our Newsroom, and a forthcoming Mailroom blog.
• One feed for Basecamp feed. We have 13 projects right now in Basecamp. These projects act like “internal” blogs so people can post updates on different projects. We even have projects for our Investors to log into and our board. Aside from Mailroom, this is probably our most used webapp.
• One feed for our wiki. Our wiki has our marketing plan, policies, guidelines, notes on how to administer our server and how to work with our code.
• One feed for Collaboa, our source code manager. Here we track bugs, planned features, and code changes.
• 2 feeds for Mailroom. Of course, all of our support, contact, and other shared email is done through Mailroom. The best part is, this is all in my newsreader, so my personal email inbox stays clutter free. I love it!
• 1 feed for our del.icio.us bookmarks. We use this to bookmark interesting pages among our team, informally.
• 3 feeds sundry other blogs we have used over time that now get updated rarely if at all.
• 1 feed from the prototype of our Super Sekret Second Product.

Sproutit External – 23 feeds – These are feeds that help me find out what others (especially our customers) are saying about us.

• 5 Technorati feeds. One for each different blog and some ‘ego’ keywords and such.
• 2 Google feeds. One for Google News another for the Google Blog Search
• 1 del.icio.us tag search feed.
• 1 furl feed.
• 2 MSN search and News feeds.
• 2 Yahoo Search feeds
• 1 Icerocket search feed
• 1 Feedster search feed.
• 1 Topix.net feed.
• 1 Feedsfarm feed
• 1 Blogdigger search feed
• 1 Plazoo search feed
• 1 Blogmarks tag feed
• 1 LookSmart search feed.
• 1 WiredNews search feed.
• 1 blogg.de tag feed.

OK, that’s only 40 feeds. Since I last wrote I have actually dropped three feeds that we no longer use. In a few days, I plan to add a few more from our new forum. This is the great thing about feeds; you can add and remove feeds easily in a news reader to get just the information you want to do your job right now.

I hope these are helpful to you. A lot of the tools we use in our business, like Basecamp and Mailroom, can apply to almost any business. Maybe you can use them in your own!

How are you using feeds to run your business? Write your story on your blog, tag it ‘imanagebyfeeds’ and we’ll link to it from our blog here.

Peter says he loves Management by Feeds because he can learn about new changes and new bug fixes as soon as they happen. There is nothing like an informed support person to make your customers exceedingly happy.

As Chris said yesterday, he loves Management by Feeds because while he is out on the road meeting investors, arranging our move back to the States, and doing his podcast, he can stay on top of all the news happening in the office. It’s like he is still here.

Shanti loves Management by Feeds because he doesn’t have a manager standing over his shoulder, breathing down his neck while he tries to work. He can focus on coding, knowing that we will all know what he’s up to whenever he checks in some code and it shows up in our feedreaders.

I love Management by Feeds because we have a team of 12 people spread all over the world and I need to know what all of them are doing. I might spend my whole day on the phone or IM with people, but thanks for feeds, I don’t generally have to interrupt them unless we have something important to talk about or I just want to be social. (happens occasionally)

No one likes having to give or listen to long drawn out reports. Everyone loves conversation, debate, and getting things done. Management by Feeds makes work more fun.