The dreaded intransigence of business silos! Okay, you’ve probably heard enough talk of this business quagmire. So instead of giving another boring explanation of how to break down business silos, let’s first take a look at some cartoons poking fun of the issue.
First off, let’s look at Davin Granroth’s cartoon and article: “How to seek and destroy organizational silos.”
David points out the nasty symptoms to look for when trying to spot an “evil silo”: lack of cooperation; breakdown in communication; and internal competition (employees looking “out for their own interests as opposed to the whole business’s interests”).
Then, we have Global Integration’s cartoon, which provides a representation of silos resulting from dispersed teams:
And finally, we have Daniel Vasconcello’s drawing paired with Larry K. Baxter’s article explaining departmental silos: how one “department may focus on itself, develop thick walls, look only up and not sideways, and avoid cooperation or even communication with other departments.”
Now that we’ve gone through that picture-book explanation, what are we really getting at? There are many solutions to breaking down silos, but I might as well talk about one I’m most familiar with: enterprise social networking. I may sound like a young idealist, but I truly believe enterprise social networking breaks down silos, increases innovation and makes work far more efficient and collaborative. After working for over a year as community manager for TIBCO and several of our tibbr customers, I’ve seen countless examples of this. Take Apache Corp., a widely dispersed drilling company. Apache used enterprise social networking to share information between different drilling communities on how to solve equipment failures and improve processes. As a result, they were not only able to collaborate better and work faster, but approach their goal of cutting trouble costs by 25 percent.
Do you have an example of how enterprise social networking has helped “destroy” the silos in your organization, or perhaps another cartoon to share? Feel free to chime in @tibbr. But, there’s no need to listen to the bustling commotion around what I’m saying (idealist self imagining), try it for yourself: http://try.tibbr.com/tibbr/users/new.
