Innovation is a buzzword for organizations today that are striving to be the best in the highly competitive world. How do we use the collective brains of people in an organization to innovate?
 
The easy and simplest answer is to break the knowledge silos that most organizations struggle with. With the growing Hybrid and virtual workforce, it is all the more critical for organizations to come up with ways to break these silos or be ready to face even bigger and harder-to-solve challenges in the future in terms of knowledge loss and staying relevant and competitive.
 
So, what are knowledge silos? 

It is the long prevalent culture where knowledge and information from a team member or a team stay within the team with no protocols in place to take it to the whole organization.
 
The lack of KM protocols and processes to ensure the distribution of knowledge across teams and countries costs organization considerably, with time spent in research, repurposing knowledge, tools, and processes already available within your organization.
 
Why knowledge silos occur:
 
The knowledge silos occur mostly because of a missing system to seamlessly integrate and distribute knowledge across the teams and organization.
 
Another key reason for knowledge silos is the failure of the leadership to communicate the organization’s vision clearly to the organization. It trickles down to the employees who fail to embrace the knowledge-sharing culture and veer off in different directions blocking the road to innovation that comes when people from different backgrounds and skills bring together their brains.
 
The absence of seamless integration between departments might end up impacting the company’s credibility.
For example, in the absence of a knowledge management system, the sales team might end up approaching a customer for selling a product or a service that is already used by the customer, due to a lack of sufficient documentation in place.
 
How to break the knowledge silos:
 
Embrace the collaboration culture: When you collaborate, you share and learn, this is the basis of sharing knowledge and breaking silos.
 
Integrate knowledge management (KM) in your organizational goals: The key is to have knowledge management, not as an individual entity but embedded into the organization’s culture and individual employees’ day-to-day work.
 
Having a KM lead culture is a sure-shot way to ensure the seamless communication of data, information as well as customer experience. When the whole organization is on the same page when it comes to sharing knowledge, experiences, and insights, the outcome is bound to be an exceptionally innovative and motivated workforce and delivery of high-quality customer experiences.

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Ekta Sachania is an experienced Knowledge and Content Manager based in India.  

View Ekta's LinkedIn Profile here...