Company Profile

Spencer Stuart is one of the world's leading executive search consulting firms. Privately held since 1956, Spencer Stuart applies its extensive knowledge of industries, functions and talent to advise select clients - ranging from major multinationals to emerging companies to nonprofit organizations - and address their leadership requirements. Through 50 offices in more than 25 countries and a broad range of practice groups, Spencer Stuart consultants focus on senior-level executive search, board director appointments, succession planning and in-depth senior executive management assessments.

"Delivering relevant, timely information in an easy-to-consume way is a challenge in most enterprises, but RSS is a great way to solve this problem. I expect it to become an indispensable technology for most businesses and be as ubiquitous as e-mail. NewsGator Enterprise Server is the only game in town when it comes to helping companies meet the challenge," Trapper Markelz, Senior Project Manager, Spencer Stuart

Knowledge Management in a Business Where Information is Everything

As one of the leading executive search consulting firms, Spencer Stuart understands the value of information. It's highly experienced "search consultants" spend much of their time interacting with board members and C-Level executives. Knowing what is happening at their clients' company or within the industry is critical for winning search assignments and placing candidates. As Trapper (John) Markelz, a Senior Project Manager at the firm notes, "Those consultants with a breadth of knowledge and understanding of the industry and talent pool do the best in terms of placements and client service."

But, keeping track of the different information sources - the Web, blogosphere, premium content providers etc. - is extremely time consuming. Since many of the search consultants are admitted "technophobes," ensuring that they get relevant information in a way that they can easily consume is particularly challenging. Asking them to use portals or simply flooding their e-mail inbox were not viable options. To address this issue, the company planned to improve their search, portal, and alerting capabilities. RSS was to play a primary role on the alerting side.

Seeing the Benefits of Enterprise RSS

Markelz and several of his colleagues had been using an RSS reader from Bloglines on an individual basis. "So much information isn't valuable because of the time it takes to get through it. With RSS, we quickly saw how it can make you much more productive and aware of information across a variety of relevant sources," Markelz said. The company's goal was to make it as easy as possible to get information to the search consultants; however, the individual readers aren't designed to have subscriptions handled at a central level. When NewsGator announced a beta program for the NewsGator Enterprise Server product, he quickly signed up.

The company needed to ensure that the product would adapt correctly behind the firewall. Since the goal was to make the process of subscribing and unsubscribing to feeds as transparent as possible, they also had to make sure that they could dynamically add and remove feed subscriptions using an API. Both of the items were quickly validated, so when the production software was made available in late 2005, they rapidly installed it and began rolling it to a select group of users.

Phase I- Making Knowledge Workers Smarter

The first phase of the project was to get the knowledge workers in the firm to become "smarter" in the way they access information. They currently have access to both internal content (from enterprise applications and repositories) and external content (news and blogs), which is accessible through NewsGator Enterprise Server in Outlook and on the Sharepoint Portal. In addition to making people more knowledgeable, the people using the product are also becoming more productive since they can sift through relevant information in much less time. Spencer Stuart has also seen other benefits.

"NewsGator Enterprise Server has been very valuable in terms of creating a conversation about how RSS can be used in our solution design," said Markelz. "Many things in the past that would have involved a number of manual processes to send alerts can now be accomplished by simply creating and subscribing people to a feed. We have also seen an increase in participation on the intranet due to RSS notifications of new content or modified content, prompting people to read/contribute further."

Phase II- On-Demand Platform for Delivering Relevant Feeds Based on Workflow

After seeing a lot of success with the first phase, the firm is embarking on the more ambitious project. They want to automatically subscribe search consultants and their associates with all of the relevant information they need on a company, its executives and news in the industry. The plan is to have a system automatically subscribe people to relevant feeds. Since many of these people aren't comfortable with technology, the whole process needs to be as seamless as possible. The goal is for them to never know they are using RSS, but simply see the timely, relevant information within an Outlook folder.

Markelz is very optimistic about this project yielding big benefits for the company. "We hope to see an increase in utilization of our information assets as more people are notified of the continual additions and content changes that are taking place," he notes. 'Such notifications are predicted to create a perception of dynamism surrounding our information services. We also hope to see people monitoring a wider variety of relevant sources and therefore becoming more informed about their industry, their clients, their peers, and the company as a whole."

Why NewsGator Enterprise Server

Spencer Stuart was initially prepared to embark on their project with individual RSS readers, but was immediately interested in NewsGator Enterprise Solution since it contained four important features that would help them see the greatest possible return on their investment:

• Outlook/Exchange integration
• Active directory integration
• Cross-device/interface synchronization
• API access for programmatic subscribe/unsubscribe

NewsGator Enterprise Server was the only product that offered these capabilities. "We didn't even consider other solutions," Markelz said. "Newsgator was the only company offering a fullfeatured server-based aggregator that could live behind the firewall. In addition, the new features and capabilities they have added since version 1.0 have been very helpful."

Final Thoughts

Markelz is excited about what the future holds for RSS in the enterprise. "People are very excited here at Spencer Stuart that we are this committed to RSS as a delivery mechanism," he notes. "Blogs and other social media tools are going to become an important part of doing business, but just how valuable are they without a way to read and aggregate them? RSS aggregators are going to play an important role in the adoption of these Web 2.0 technologies."

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This case study is for informational purposes only.