We live at a time where the ethos of the business world is becoming about innovation, collaboration, integration, and so many other buzzwords that have to do with connectivity. In the past, these were ideas associated with those at the fringe, but today living in a walled garden can pose an existential threat to any group seeking to be competitive in the marketplace. Many companies are struggling to embrace this change, in part because the old paradigm treated information as an asset. Either you had it or you didn’t, and possession gave the owner a degree of power. In this way of viewing information, there were strong incentives to create information bottlenecks, even within organizations. Processes were slower, but ownership of information was paramount. Growth of silos around strategic information was a natural process.
Today, uniquely in history, information can also be a commodity. It is now cheap, abundant, and if WikiLeaks and Anonymous have taught us anything, near impossible to hide. Companies that started or rode the wave of this new paradigm have had a head start, all companies at some point or another will confront information silos as they grow or try to adapt to new paradigms of information management. While there are many circumstances where information sharing can be destructive or harmful (personal health records and bank account information are a few that come to mind), my focus is on silos that exist around information that can be put to good use by many if widely distributed. From groups or companies seeking to navigate the world of information as a commodity, recognizing and then breaking down silos is an important business investment that must be made. For startups and growing companies, avoiding silos around information that is more valuable if shared is an important consideration when building long term organizational strategies.
Diagnosing a silo
In my last article I discussed the concept of Information Velocity, which is based on the relationship between the amount of time spent searching for data and the amount of time spent digesting the data and converting it into useful information. In any given project, the more time spent digesting and converting relative to searching, the higher the velocity of that information. This is a good method diagnosing a silo because it measures the amount of effort required to get information from a particular source. The lower the velocity, the more likely you are to be dealing with a silo.
Let’s look at an example of a fictional business, TeamXcite, that sells wall-painting robots to retirement homes. Within TeamXcite, there are four departments – Finance, IT, Sales, and Engineering. Let’s say that each department operates under its own Managing Director, and each has its own process for taking requests or otherwise engaging with groups from other departments (more common than you’d think). Under normal circumstances, the executive team announces a product line, then unleashes Sales on the market to get contracts signed. Sales gets the bookings, and also manages the company’s relationship with the client. Engineering then gets fulfilment orders for the contracts booked by Sales and builds to contract specs. IT supports internal information management (e-mail, desktop support, business applications, data security). Because each department uses its own enterprise application to store documents and other key information, acquiring knowledge from an organization outside of one’s own becomes an exercise in who-you-know and organizational politics. Overall, TeamXcite reflects a common information management and sharing experience – one that involves a high degree of information segmentation and silofication within the company.
Breaking a silo
There are three major ways that silos can be broken down within an organization: leadership lead (top-down), employee lead (bottom-up), and a combination of the two. The approach that will work best depends on a number of factors, and includes company culture, financial health of the company, organization size, geographical distribution of the workforce, and overall morale. Any number of tools can be used to implement the change – adoption of a single searchable document storage solution across the enterprise, social media platforms, direct representation of all departments on all project execution teams (where appropriate), cross departmental advisory groups. In the long run, for the change to be sustainable there must be effort from both sides to ensure adoption of an information sharing paradigm. A change may be mandated by managers, but it requires adoption by staff to be effective. Similarly, staff may push for a change in a unified voice, but managers need to make the structural changes necessary to support it. So while the initiative for breaking information silos may come from one end of the company or the other, the whole company must learn to support the ethos of open collaboration and information-as-a-commodity.
