Breaking Down Silos

At a conference I attended, knowledge management team members discussed a vibrant KM community as a way of breaking down silos. Sharing information person to person across departments and divisions is a great way to share information. This type of sharing can also be time consuming and rely on serendipity. Often, Communities of Practice can solve cross departmental and divisional problems.

Recently, APQC* talked about breaking down silos as well. Silos can protect information, but silos also “prevent groups across an enterprise from collaborating toward common goals like process improvement or innovation.”

Silos can be a product of competition. Departments will sometimes hoard information so members get better bonuses or credit for finishing a project ahead of schedule. Silos can also be the result of the way information storage systems were developed.

There are many ways to break down silos in addition to person to person.

  1. Publicize your projects
  2. Publicize your tools
  3. Read newsletters, articles and project reports (the other side of numbers 1 & 2).
  4. Attend cross functional meetings about a variety of topics. You never know what you will learn
  5. Assign cross departmental liaisons
  6. Respond to requests for information within your company, or externally according to company guidelines.

Publicizing your projects not only helps others understand what you are doing, but allows you to share how you got the work done. This is a great way to talk about the innovative spreadsheet you created to make work easier or the slide deck template you created to ensure all team members were using something that identified them as part of the department.

Do you use special tools? Do you use standard tools in an innovative way? One of the best ways to break down silos is to use standard tools and share how you use them. Don’t share a standard IT tutorial, but share how you took the tutorial and made the tool your own.

Read newsletters, articles and project reports to find out what innovative tools or processes were created to accomplish team goals. Many organizations publish a newsletter. In large organizations, many newsletters are published. Skimming a variety of these information sources regularly gives you insights into what is going on in other parts of the organization. I have seen a KM Specialist translate IT’s missives into tutorials that helped her team work smarter. She, then, shared the information on the department website and with other KM professionals via a newsletter. The readers could then take the same information, reuse it and morph it into something else that was new.

Attend cross functional meetings about a variety of topics. You never know what you will learn. While we are all busy, you find some of your best ideas by attending events and meetings where you are a little out of your comfort zone. You also make connections that you otherwise would not have made. You have to pay better attention, thus you hear things you may not have heard before. Sometimes these ideas turn into something that can help you in your work or provide a connection that you wouldn’t have otherwise found.

Assign cross departmental liaisons. Since KM people often work alone, they tend to seek out other KM people and, naturally, act as liaisons. When you do not yet have a dedicated KM person on your team, it is important to assign someone to reach out to other departments until you can budget for a dedicated KM person.

Breaking down silos is a great way to be able to reuse information others have developed.

References:

  • APQC, Breaking Down Silos For Better Collaboration article

*Nota bene: APQC is a membership institution and you may need access through your organization.