Silo-busting & customization in the digital workplace
Silos are a reality in nearly all organizations. Seventy-five percent of the 440 organizations in the Global Intranet Trends survey say that their main silos are those represented by employee functions such as HR, communications and IT.
Silos are behind much of the difficulty in achieving a coherent digital workplace from an employee viewpoint. Different stakeholders have different sites and approaches; lack of overall coordination is not unusual.
Automated customization of the common entry point into the digital workplace (= the home page) correlates to fewer silos in the enterprise:
- The “employee support silos” drops from 75% to 58% when half or more of the content on the common entry page is customized in an automated way.
- The “collaborative space silos” drops from 43 % to 30 %.
Obviously, the question is: do the “less silo’ed” enterprises also have more automated customization? Or does customization somehow help breakdown the silos? My guess is the second. I’ll explain why.
Defining a customization strategy triggers new, difficult conversations
I have run workshops in many complex, multi-stakeholder organizations where the objective was to define a customization strategy for the entry page. The workshops are sometimes tough going because, in many cases, they trigger conversations between employee support functions that have never before worked together on a shared project.
Forcing stakeholders to apply “user logic” eases the conflicts of interest
Communication stakeholders will have different priorities than HR or business stakeholders when it comes to what they think is important for the home page. And vice versa. The way through the disagreements and conflicts of interest is to force a focus on the user. What is logical for the user? I’ve seen stakeholders’ mouths drop open in astonishment as they observe card-sorting exercises with users. (That’s always a lot of fun!)
Individual personalization, waiting for social media?
Interestingly, individual personalization also correlates with a drop in employee support silos, but increases for collaborative space silos to 47 %, slightly higher than the survey average.
Individual personalization needs more research in general. In spite of the general belief that people do not use it, the leaders enable it more than the others. 14 % enable it for half or more of the content compared to 8 % of the others.
My own take on this is that people will start using social media features to individualize their entry pages and overall digital workplace experience once social features are better integrated into intranets.
Geography still separates
Geographical silos are another ballpark all together. It appears that neither automated customization nor individual personalization can be correlated in a significant way.
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Does any of this surprise you?
FYI: The silo questions on the 2010 survey were formulated as follows:
If you feel your organization suffers from silos, how should you describe them?
- “Our employee support functions sometimes work as silos. (HR, Communication, IT, etc.)” – the highest at 75 %
- “We have some geographical and/or language silos.” – 54 %
- “Some of our collaborative spaces have become information silos.” – 43 %
Comments
Interesting problems you are describing. Can’t see any quick fix for breaking down geo-silos (or any other silo for that matter).
Anyhow, this might be something that can work in some cases: By using location based information (LBI) the personalization could actually just be a filter that shows all information related to you that is relevant for your (current) geo location. Example: if all PMs are geo-tagged (or org-tagged/subject etc) a personalized “List” of PMs could show all relevant PMs related to the relevant geo location. So what happen is that everyone still considers the information siloed. But, you (as a user) can personalize the “List” to show all information (regardless of geo location), the silo is only “virtual” now and not “physical” anymore. This way silos can be opened physically (meaning that access is allowed for anyone) but the users of the actual silo still only see what they have always seen… But for example, the search engine can find all info because the info is no longer under restricted access…
So additional metadata (geo-data) added to the information in a silo can “restrict” access to information (by filtering based on geo-data) and this way the users of the silo have the same information as they have always had with the bonus effect that others now get access to the information. Win-Win?
What’s your take on this? Could it work in some cases?
Jane, I haven’t reloaded the page since this morning, so I didn’t see your comment until now. Thanks for referring to my blog post! I agree with you that it probably will take some time before we se LBI happening. And languages = difficult problem.
The catalyst for breaking down geo-silos will be automated translation. I believe that the main barrier is language – followed closely by cultural differences, but the latter can be overcome by a strong company culture.
Automated Location Based Information may be a part of the solution but certainly not all of it.
As for breaking down the other silos, I agree with you, Jane. Customisation is the way forward.
@risgaard Good point. Automated translation is a good way to break down language silos. Already used by some orgs. But at this point in time it’s not 100% correct. So it’s hard today to base decisions on auto-translated info. As a consequence, it cannot be used in highly regulated industries like healthcare, pharma. Because there can be no errors or room for misunderstanding in the info/data. But eventually I guess automated translation will be 100% correct.
Automated translation whilst it’s not 100% doesn’t rule it out completely (even in highly regulated industries) – it simply shifts the content type from formal (and thereby ‘trusted’ and ‘approved’) to something a little softer.
Content that is critical (esp. in such industries where there it has to be known/followed/etc) will be formally translated.
The challenge then is communicating to the reader that the automated translation isn’t to be treat as formal content.
If you can managed to get buy-in, I can see <100% automated translations as a part of the mix nevertheless.
@beantin Good arguments. You convinced me and thus I agree. As you say the hard part is to communicate the status of the content as “informal” since it is auto-translated.
I think most silos are made so because they serve a purpose. The silo is made for a specified group of people. Most of the times the information is not confidential, so there are no problems opening them up. But if you open up all silos then there is a big risk that there will be to much information and that leads to information overflow.
So what I was trying to exemplify was a scenario where all the silos information have metadata attached to it that says if the info belongs to a certain group, part of an org. or a geographical location.
This metadata is used to create the appearance (by using that metadata to still target the information to that specific group) of a silo to those that used to belong the group having access to the information in the silo.
Since the silo is now open, it can be indexed by the enterprise search and accessed by others. The silo is thus “virtual” and “un-siloed” physically.
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Taking the opportunity to focus just on the Geographical silo aspect: Kristian Norling wrote a blog post this week about possible applications for mobile intranets: http://sys64738.se/2011/01/thoughts-on-a-mobile-phone-enhanced-intranet/
I think, in time, we could see geographical silos being broken down – or at least transformed – by the adoption of location based information via the mobile intranet.
Most orgs are probably a few steps away from that happening, and it involves some notable changes on both the technical side and the human side.
Unfortunately though, it doesn’t directly address the issue of /language/ silos!