It’s been well over 18 months—maybe more—since I first suggested that intranets could take advantage of RSS feeds. It has been a bit confounding that, since then, I have found one (count ‘em: one) company with an intranet that incorporates RSS feeds.

This doesn’t count those intranets that have incorporated real, honest-to-God blogs (not blog look-alikes). Whether it’s a standard blog app like Typepad and pMachine or an enterprise-strength blogging utility like Traction, these implementations automatically support RSS. But they don’t add RSS capabilities to non-blog content. It’s in this non-blog content that intranets have such great potential to exploit.

Intranet editors and managers routinely complain that they can’t drive traffic to their intranets. “We have all this great news and information, but we can’t convince people to go there,” they tell me. In many instances, I can detect the problem at a glance. The intranet is news and information and virtually no work processes. If the intranet isn’t the hub of an employee’s work day, there’s not much that will compel employees to spend time there no matter how important the news may be. Beyond that, though, is the fact that employees have to make an effort to retrieve the news that, back in the print days, just landed on their desks.

Give every employee a news reader and turn this news items into feeds. Problem solved. Some feeds could be required, built into the reader and not removable by employees. These feeds contain news deemed important enough that all employees need to see it whether they think it’s important or not. The rest would be subscription-based. Want to know when there’s a transcript of a new executive speech? Subscribe to the feed. Need updates on a specific project or two? Get their feeds.

I’ve made this suggestion to several intranet managers, including one today at a meeting in Toronto. “It’s a good idea,” the intranet editor told me. “We just have some technical hurdles to deal with.”

I can’t imagine what these would be, other than bandwidth (and he wasn’t talking about bandwidth). Feed creation has become easy with tools like FeedForAll (no product endorsement intended). It’s no big deal to create a feed link on pages that offer them. And news readers are mostly free and many are open-source; IT could easily adapt one for internal use.

So why the snail’s pace in the adoption of RSS in the enterprise? Its place on intranets is inevitable; sooner, rather than later, every intranet will offer feeds. But I thought we’d be farther along by now than we are. If you run an intranet, let me know what’s holding you back.