Three Silos That Enterprise 2.0 Must Break

"Expertise is emergent" says Harvard professor Andrew McAfee.  By this, he means that the people and information which can help with a particular issue can come from anywhere inside an organization. Greater access to a diverse set of information, analysis and opinions is a driver of the success of prediction markets.

Given these factors, why haven't companies instituted better ways to allow expertise to be emergent? Historically, the tools haven't been up to the job. The nature of most business applications is to focus your attention on executing a specific task. It's efficient, but the idea of making what workers know and do accessible to a wider audience was really never part of the plan.

Traditional work has three silos which limit companies' ability to realize the full value of emergent expertise:

1. Information silos
2. Knowledge silos
3. Connection silos

Addressing these three silos is a key responsbility of Enterprise 2.0 if it is to drive meaningful improvements inside companies. Let's examine each of them.

Information Silos

Information silos are repositories of recorded information that are inaccessible in the regular flow of work. This definition deliberately broadens the meaning of silo beyond being only a closed application with limited user access rights.

Email is an example of an information silo. Only those who receive the email can access information in it. Your computer's local hard drive is another example of an information silo.

But how about something like a wiki or a blog? The information is accessible to all. How is that a silo?

If you think the key characteristic of a silo is that people aren't accessing the information, then any friction which limits people accessing information raises the "silo factor" for an application. With email, it's a structural limitation to access. With open applications, the silo is based on the failure to put the information in-the-flow of daily work. If employees don't consult an application for information they need in their jobs, you have a de facto silo.

Strategies for breaking these silos differ.

• If the silo is based on structural access limitations (e.g. email, local drive), getting key users in the organization to actively change their behavior is an important step. Relevant information that others want needs to migrate to social software
• If the silo is based on an application being out-of-the-flow of daily work, integrating that application and its content with existing systems is a smart strategy. Notifications of relevant content are also useful for share of mind.

The strategies for addressing these silos are actually more complex than laid out above, but those are topics for another day.

Knowledge Silos

Knowledge in this case is the information and perspectives we carry around in our heads. As Telligent's George Dearing tweeted the other day:

client's comment discussing collab strategy -- "it's not about sharing things in SharePoint, it's about sharing our brain"

Our heads are the silos. There are actually two definitions for this, tacit and implicit:

Tacit: The subjective, intangible knowledge we have, but of which we are not aware and cannot articulate.

Implicit: Knowledge that can be articulated, but has not yet.

In the knowledge management movement, historically the effort was on recording the information people carried in their heads. This is an honorable undertaking, and the reirement of the baby boomers is a motivator for this.

But the act of recording information outside a direct tangible need is laborious and incomplete. It's estimated that 80 - 90 percent of organizations' knowledge is tacit or implicit. The effort to record this would take a lot of time and quickly become out of date, as such knowledge is constantly evolving.

A better strategy for breaking the knowledge silos is to expand the opportunities for what's inside people's heads to be applied as situations occur. This is fundamentally different from the historical KM focus. The emphasis is not recording information, but on matching people to others who can help them.

The typical organization is not well-equipped for accessing the knowledge inside people's heads on a scalable, recurring basis. Sure, mass emails would catch attention. But also hits a lot of people who won't have knowledge that can help and will become treated as spam over time.

Increasing the intersections of need and knowledge is the opportunity for Enterprise 2.0 to help organizations.

Connections Silos

The most natural thing for people to do is to turn to those with whom they have existing strong connections when they need help. Approaching total strangers to help answer questions is not typical or welcome behavior.

The challenge this presents is that solving problems becomes overly dependent on the knowledge of those with whom you share strong ties.

 

This isn't to say they won't provide valuable input. But there are two risks with being overly reliant on strong ties:

1. Development over time of a redundant point of view by the group
2. Missing valuable input from someone who could be quite helpful

This is the third silo, call it the Connections Silo.

Enterprise 2.0's mission is to expand the scope of one's ties inside an organization. Connections don't happen overnight, so exposing the activities and knowledge of others gives rise over time to familiarity with different colleagues throughout the organization. And enabling employees to find colleagues who might be able to help lets them do a bit of outreach: the first step in diversifying one's information connections.

The Opportunity

This is a prescriptive post. It doesn't go in-depth into the optimal ways to solve the three different silos, although it does give some of our point of view. But generally, breaking these silos is the assistance that social software vendors must provide to organizations. It is then that expertise can be truly emergent.

Comments

[Paula Thornton]

I do need to read this a few more times, but 'breaking' the silos isn't necessarily the best prescription. Why? Misinterpretation. Most common: "undo".

As a comparison -- mid 90's data warehousing project MCI. Flat file of Friends & Family database was moved to client/server -- HUGE mistake. Data is data. Leave it be. Put infrastructures around it for access. Operationalize it and informationalize it, but don't break it.

Indeed, 2.0 is all about leaving the data alone. My classic example is the people directory already in Lotus Notes -- created single field, autofill, lookup that bypassed 3 layers of UI to access already in-place profiles. Killer!

[susan scrupski]

Hey Hutch. Before we can talk about the mechanics of connecting the plumbing for enterprise intelligence, we all have to take a closer look at transforming the organizational psyche. The freedom, openness, and sharing we embrace on the social web is anathema today to the way most companies behave. We can't break silos, we have to rebuild. We need to replace instinctive self-preservation and competitive paranoia with trust and generosity. Not easy to do, but we'll get there.

[Lawrence Liu (Telligent)]

All 3 silos described in this post exists in every org's email system. While there's a growing anti-email movement (though I hope that it will remain just a cult), that fact is that "opening up" (rather than breaking) these silos can be relatively easy to do with a forums solution that has what I call "2-way email fidelity," which allows emails to be stored for viewing/replying via Web browser and indexed for searching. Extending that further, email attachments can be stripped out and put into a separate media gallery for discovery by others outside the email loop and for reuse in being referenceable in other content or even other emails. I can go on, but I strongly believe that email is the bridge between Enterprise 1.0 and Enterprise 2.0.

Oh, BTW, Telligent's Evolution product has the functionality I described above. :-)

[Hutch Carpenter]

Paula - in that context, you're right. "Breaking" has a whole different meaning. But you picked up on the essential meaning of the post: "Operationalize it and informationalize it". The silos here are not so much structural as cultural.

[Hutch Carpenter]

Susan - I agree, organizations need to be willing to change. I'm wondering though, if there are incremental changes that bring an organization along in terms of Enterprise 2.0 readiness, rather than a wholesale change in enterprise mentality. Waiting for a wholesale change seems like a tough way to effect changes. Small increases in sharing and transparency seem like good ways to get enterprises comfortable.

[Hutch Carpenter]

Lawrence - email is definitely a part of the enterprise landscape. Solutions which acknowledge that fact are smart. Care must be taken with how these emails are shared though. Much of what occurs inside email is certainly appropriate for collaborative software, like wikis. But there's a perfectly reasonable use case of closed loop, private conversations with email. Those wouldn't be appropriate for sharing.

[Lawrence Liu (Telligent)]

Sharing email does not mean doing so without any access control. By default, if I'm having a PRIVATE email discussion with 3 other people, only the 4 of us should have access to the web browsable/searchable copies of that thread.

That's why Telligent Community Server supports public groups, private groups, and hidden private groups - all with 2-way email fidelity. :-)

[Sreya Dutta]

Hi Hutch, a very informative post. I think you've very clearly presented the silos and the clarity is needed for one to 'break' them as you say. The question I have is, how do you break them? I am sure there would be multiple strategies and there are few suggestions in the comments. I am more concerned about this aspect, as it takes time and effort to consolidate this information into an accessible format and as you're rightly pointed out, the information is outdated by the time you do that.

The way this gets me thinking is, to move to using integrated enterprise tools 2.0 for all means of communication. But this isn't realistic as there would be huge amounts of legacy information which is impossible to categorize and manage. This is a real problem and can only be resolved in the future when we've adopted the new tools as part of our daily activity fully and do not depend on independent email systems etc. It doesn't seem very easy somehow as it has to happen gradually.

[Chris Jones]

Great post & comments, definitely thought provoking.

I think culture will remain the predominant challenge when discussing 2.0. Sure, the tools make it easier to share & break down silo's. But if people don't think to do it, don't want to do it, or aren't incented to do it, old habits will likely prevail. Plus I've found it actually takes extra work to share, w/ steps to index, tag and publish instead of just letting a doc land where it wants to (hard drive, email folder). We've all fought the battle of findability when we organize our personal email and hard drive folders. Our personal 'taxonomies' change over time w/ new projects and assignments, so keeping up with our own scheme is hard enough. Taking that to 'n' other employees?

Knowledge Management (KM) & Information Architecture (IA) will always struggle when the scope is 'all'. Boiling the ocean has never really worked. e2.0 won't make it magically easier.

That said, I DO see some hope for e2.0 tools, provided Millenials (and frustrated GenX/GenYer's) provide organizational leadership to drive culture change. Even if its local to a workgroup or department, it's a start.

So how do we fill the prescription? In reverse:

(3) INFORMATION: Redesign & redeploy all your apps. When did you want that? I don't see much changing on this front; maybe the high-tech email integration above can provide near term relief ("2-way email fidelity?" I like the sound of that). Business intelligence (BI) and data warehouse (DW) solutions are likely your best bet to aggregate and publish clean, normalized corp data. Local e20 tools can't solve those challenges with accuracy, any more than Excel can.

(2) KNOWLEDGE: culture barriers can be removed; when they are, e2.0 tools will help

(1) CONNECTION/TEAM: START HERE, this is where SM e2.0 tools will shine; as people start to work together outside their natural work groups, the culture starts to change ...

Hope that adds some value. Thanks for the insights.

[Postkort]

Even though this kind of thing is not so nessesary in smaller companies, I still think that Connectbeam could help companies as small as 10-40 people. So I think you are missing out on a lot with the minimum requirement of 100 licenses.

[printer cartridges]

I read this article few days before but breaking the silos is a necessary thing and it provides a best description. It is quite common like a data warehouse project.