Occam Razor

Breaking Through Silos with Business Social Networking

When we talk about tearing down or breaking through Silos in an organization to improve communications and collaboration, these are the questions I think any business leader should focus on answering:

• Why do you want to break through silos in the first place?
• How come we have silos at all?
• What can I do about it?

1. Why break through silos, what is a silo and why should you care?

It’s simple; silos impact your ability to execute and to deliver results. Silos make it hard to share information and thus slow communications and prevent collaboration.

Whether your run a small company, or employ thousands of people around the world, you need simple and flexible communications that save you time and money, and help you make the most of business opportunities.

Breaking down information silos to improve communications has a direct impact on your bottom line, your ability to innovate and to stay competitive in your industry.

2. How come we have silos at all?

In reality, there are probably many reasons for this including everything from human nature to business management to information technology. There are however, two primary reasons for information silos upon which Human Resources and IT departments have had a direct impact on in regards to technology and software solutions.

Reason number one--We have ubiquitous, reliable communications throughout the business with email and mobile phones.

You can virtually reach out to any individual, literally anywhere in the world, at any time and do so reliably. It is pretty much inconceivable that you’d have a workforce without one of these basic forms of reliable communications.

They work great for one to one communications. But break down quite quickly when you try to use them to do work with multiple people at once. Email creates little tiny, one person silos in your inbox and saved folders. A bunch of really valuable data gets put in there, files, thoughts, communications, questions and answers it all gets packed away in folders and really only one person can get to it. It’s like a little library with only one librarian, who has the only library card; all the other users have to go through you to get access to the data. In many ways, mobile technology is just an extension of this phenomenon in its creation of silos, only with worse data collection and smaller, more temporal data.

In the inbox, because we’re not able to expose the exchanges publicly, we can’t get any wisdom of the crowds and the same questions get answered over and over and the same email chains keep making the rounds with outdated files attached. It’s a mess when information is trapped in silos and it creates bad communication.

Reason number two--  Enterprise 1.0 collaboration were inconsistent, they never got enough people on one system, and they weren’t easy to use – the result is that they usually aren’t utilized reliably by all or even most people inside an organization.

This is not to say that these weren’t good tools (e.g. file sharing, groupware, CRM, and other systems). In some cases these were revolutionary software tools for their time. But with the rise of the interconnected enterprise, where people are accessing data from mobile phones, the cloud and personal devices the gap between power users of these first generation tools and the everyday knowledge worker is widening.

You’ve got power users of legacy systems tying up information in 1^st generation tools that not everyone is on and most people don’t use. And you’ve got everyday users resorting to email for collaboration building smaller silos of information in their inboxes and mobile devices. Silos are being built everyday, everywhere across all size businesses.

3. What can I do about it?

Ok great you say. Now what can I do about it? How do I break through these information silos?

Tip #1 Make some communications public and available for discovery.

The types of communications you want to get out of email are the collaborations. Those emails that go to more than 2 people, which are about a project, that have a file attached for review or are asking a question to a broad group of people. You have to get those into a searchable, public space where people can find it.

How to demo using CubeTree to break down information silos in email and SharePoint to make collaborations availble on mobile devices and in public spaces.

Tip #2 Support Mobile with your social collaboration solution.

You’ve got to be on people’s mobile devices. People love their mobile phones and they love their email, possibly the only thing they love more is email on their mobile phone. So any system you put in place to improve email collaboration had better plug seamlessly into both. New users are going to ask “If I put it in your business social network, I had better be able to get notifications on important things in my email and on my mobile device.”

Tip #3 – Make it easy to use.

You can build a really great system and give it all kinds of power and configurability. But if you don’t make it easy to use, then most people just won’t use it and you’ll end up creating more silos of information. Incidentally, it’s also important that it can integrate with some of these legacy systems, like SharePoint, which most organizations (85%!) have.

Tip #4 – You’ve got to include everyone.

And by everyone, I mean EVERYONE in your company has to be on the system, even if they don’t use it. That’s why email and mobile applications work. It’s pretty much inconceivable that you won’t be able to send an email or call someone in your company. The same has to be true for a social network. Not everyone has to be a power user. But if I’m going to send you a message about a project on CubeTree, you have to be there, even if you’ve never logged in, your account needs to be there ready for you. It’s a key element to adoption.

With CubeTree you add collaboration into the SuccessFactors BizX Suite. Which means it’s tied into a system that everyone in your company cares about! Because everyone has a profile in the SuccessFactors suite that they use to find information and map their goals and do their performance review and all the other BizX activities, you know your collaboration tools are part of a system that people use and are already on. Which means you get 100% coverage with SuccessFactors CubeTree--just like you get with email and mobile phones!

4. Results

Follow these tips to unlock all the information stored away in those email and legacy system silos. In doing so you’ll improve communications, save time and money and include everyone.

Companies that implement social colaboration tools see these distinct results:

• 30% increase in the speed of access to knowledge
• 20% decrease in travel costs
• 30% increase in the speed of access to internal experts

Source: McKinsey Quarterly – December 2010

All that adds up to measurable results. Implementing social collaboration solutions, like CubeTree, to break down informational silos has a direct impact on your business. Allowing companies to make better decisions, faster.

Breaking Through Organizational Silos with Social Collaboration

This is my latest presenation and webinar. It's a short overview of how new business social networking tools can help break through traditional silos to help all of us make better decisions, faster in the workplace.

 

3 Simple Steps CEO's Can Use To Engage Employees

I am working with a CubeTree customer whose CEO wants to communicate with employees, engaging them with real opportunities to interact. The IT Director and the CEO agreed that the existing channels, email and the company intranet, were falling short.

We discussed three simple steps that executives can follow to engage employees through CubeTree: informally with microblogging, more formally with blogging, and as an observer.

Step 1: Micro-blog. With microblogging, executives can easily communicate directly with the employees. CEOs are on the front of some of the most exciting daily events for the company. It is motivational and inspiring for them to share their insights on meetings with customers, visits to branch offices, and talks with partners. The whole company benefits from the positive environment created when the CEO sends a shout out for a job well done. Sharing these events in real-time, even using photos to highlight an update, is a powerful way to connect instantly and emotionally with the entire workforce.

On the receiving end, employees get a real pulse on what's happening in the business from the perspective of its leaders. It lets people know that their work matters. Then, because it's a collaborative system, they can communicate back! Because it's more informal than email, microblogging makes it easy to comment and provides the executives with direct feedback from the employees on the front lines.

Step 2: Blog don't email. For more formal communications like state of the union messages, CEOs can use the personal blog. This provides a way to communicate to a broad audience without the message getting lost in employee's inboxes. With blogs, it's easy to add links, photos and video, which improves the message's "stickiness". But the real advantage of the blog is that readers can comment back, and others can see these posts and then add their thoughts to the conversation, creating an authentic discussion with multiple points of view. Of course, email does let people reply, but most are reluctant to spam their colleagues. Even if employees don't hesitate to reply, the conversation often gets jumbled due to messages received and replied to out of order. A conversation in email is much harder to read and participate in than the same discussion in CubeTree.

Step 3: Read and react. As an observer on CubeTree, the CEO can keep an eye on the business across virtually all the major projects in the company. Similar to microblogging, it's unfettered, unfiltered access; it's watching projects evolve in public groups not just getting the updates in prepared reports. That allows the CEO, at critical points, to interject a comment or nudge an idea in a direction that's best for the company. As people in the organization brainstorm and come up with innovative concepts, those who see the "big picture", like the CEO, will recognize and adopt the ideas that company needs to be successful. Without CubeTree, these ideas might never have seen the light of day.

As the CEO and other execs lead by microblogging about their day to day activities, blogging about major initiatives, and participating in CubeTree conversations, the employees will be better informed and offer valuable feedback. Employees will take cues from the company's leaders and increase their use of microblogging and blogging as well. And as they do this, the workforce will be more active and more engaged, which for the company means more innovation and better business execution.