Silo? What Silo?

Information Silos. I often talk about them, and I hear people talk about them all the time.

"We need to break down the walls between functions and departments. We need other people to share their information and content with us."

A sentiment I heard expressed at a conference recently by the representative of a large engineering company.

Yet two days later when it was suggested that the design engineers in her company should be given web based authoring tools so that they could write the basic information needed for a technical procedure, her immediate response was "No way! I'll never let engineers write technical procedures. That's the technical authors' job."

Sounds like creating silos to me. Don't expect others to share and collaborate if you're not intending to do the same.

Getting others to break down their information and process silos means you have to do it first.