Personally I agree – I think the silo problem is a massive one and in my experience the “next” level of maturity as companies implement multiple solutions without and sense of a platform in this space and then realise they've created a series of piles of knowledge that while perhaps more collaborative, still aren't joined up and collected together.

We are building a tool at http://www.binaryplex.com which we believe helps solve some of this problem, by focussing on people and their demonstrated expertise across the silos and tying it all back together.

As a past Enterprise Architect, I also agree with your conclusion on fighting the farmers, the best way to prevent something is to stop it being built in the first place!

Personally I agree – I think the silo problem is a massive one and in my experience the “next” level of maturity as companies implement multiple solutions without and sense of a platform in this space and then realise they've created a series of piles of knowledge that while perhaps more collaborative, still aren't joined up and collected together.

We are building a tool at http://www.binaryplex.com which we believe helps solve some of this problem, by focussing on people and their demonstrated expertise across the silos and tying it all back together.

As a past Enterprise Architect, I also agree with your conclusion on fighting the farmers, the best way to prevent something is to stop it being built in the first place!

You're right that technology is key here. However, so is planning and
process. Organizations now have been warned about the defaults embedded in
SharePoint. They are going to have to be very intentional in overriding
those defaults in order to achieve the open communication and knowledge
sharing promised by Microsoft. Hopefully Microsoft will recognize the gap
between what it has promised and what it has delivered, and will help
provide some engineering solutions. Otherwise, it will be up to individual
enterprises to create workflow to deal with this problem.

- Mary

Thanks for the info on PBWorks Project Edition. Based on your experience,
what's the advantage to embedding multiple work spaces in your product
versus following Bill's recommendation of robust enterprise search?

- Mary

- Mary

It is not intentional on the part of the organization. It is intentional by the technology. The default is for privacy and isolating information instead of sharing it.

Sharepoint is making some headway because it is part of the default suite of applications in the Office platform. That is the default set of tools for many, many businesses. The weaknesses in Sharepoint is that it too defaults to isolation of information instead of sharing it.

http://blog.pbworks.com/2009/06/03/welcome-pbwo…

And some reactions to it:

http://blog.pbworks.com/2009/06/03/around-the-w…

Breaking down silos is one of the main goals we had when we created PBworks Project Edition. Unlike our previous product, where each workspace sat in isolation, Project Edition lets you embed an unlimited number of workspaces in an overall corporate “network”, complete with network-wide search.

Bill,

Could not agree more that search is the key. As the number of workspaces proliferates (much like SharePoint instances can proliferate), search becomes essential. It's also the case that our SaaS model is (ironically enough) better for IT, because IT can take on the role of a network-wide admin…this allows IT to manage all the disparate workspace instances rather than worrying about what might be happening under the radar.