Process Silos are killing your productivity

Silos are often heavily guarded fortresses which are protected by impenetrable vines of bureaucracy, entrenched interests and the established ways of doing things.

THE SYMPTOMS

Typical symptoms of silos include:

• Heavy reliance on email and flooded inboxes
• Important information falling through the cracks.
• Redundant messages/notifications.
• Flooded inboxes.
• Difficulty finding information in Excel.
• No easy way to provide an overview of the project’s progress.
• Manual scheduling.
• Manual workflow management.
• No integration with other teams, clients and/or departments.
• Error-prone and time-consuming cutting and pasting spreadsheets.
• Missed sending of notifications and updates.
• No central repository of information.

Silos limit your access to knowledge about your customers, projects, employees and opportunities to use that knowledge to better serve the marketplace.

Silos obscure the overall visibility of work being done in the organization as a result of multiple interfaces, disjointed processes, and complex data integration.

There are many types of silos:

Collaborative and Communication silos

It is often very difficult for workers to collaborate effectively with users of other systems at the real-time point of decision. Emails and phone calls are poor mediums when the need to take action is now. Interaction between multiple departments that need to make a decision handled through email and telephone means no tracking and no automated ability to follow-up if tasks are slipping. As a result, business action is less than optimal, and valuable insights are lost.

The lack of a common understanding of what needs to be done and the context in which it needs to be accomplished leads to less than optimum results.

Process silos

Front-, middle- and back-office functions are usually componentized and departmentalized. There is often limited and sometimes almost hostile interaction between the various parts of an organization’s value chain, which discourages collaborative work and makes virtual teaming next to impossible.

Data silos

Data is typically organized into different systems that cannot talk to each other, resulting in the same data having to be keyed in multiple times. Where integration is attempted, there is the added complexity of each system having its own unique method of integration. Data silos force users to go to multiple applications and use multiple data sources to get a single task done.

Many users find themselves in the situation where they need to integrate data from a variety of applications to get their work done, and the only way to do it is to copy and paste it into a spreadsheet.

In addition, data is often incomplete, missing, duplicated, or inaccurate. This makes many business processes inefficient, ineffective, and costly, increasing organizational risk. Employees will waste time looking for the data they need — or spend too little time and make decisions based on incomplete information.

Application silos

Billions of dollars are lost every year because information systems don’t work together. A vast amount of unnecessary time is spent in every office in every corner of the world just trying to act as the glue between systems. This is particularly true when a single task that needs to be done requires information from more than one system. This means that a user has to take the time to compose the information they need to complete the task. Not only does it waste time, it is prone to error and can impair decision making.

Fixing the problem — thinking about Activity Streams

Information silos highlight one of the most important problems in today’s enterprise: companies are overwhelmed by the vast quantities of data generated during the normal course of business. How do companies optimize the flow of information to promote efficiency, knowledge sharing and a connected, well-informed workforce?

The solution to the information overflow problem is the activity streams. Activity streams are the future of enterprise collaboration, uniting people, data, and applications in real-time in a central, accessible, virtual interface. Think of a company social network where every employee, system, and business process exchanged up-to-the-minute information about their activities and outcomes. Now, instead of pockets of knowledge, the company will have one central nervous system that unifies every piece of corporate information. Each employee can find data that they never knew existed, collaborate around this information and access it in a variety of ways (email, mobile applications, and through existing infrastructure).

Activity streams are able to fundamentally change how companies do business, by unlocking the vast amount of information generated by everyday operations and making it instantly available across previously defined boundaries. Activity streams humanize every business process inside a company, adding a social layer to data and opening up real-time collaboration.

The activity stream becomes the user’s jumping off point for collaboration, investigation, notification and workflow progression.”

While organizations often initially deploy enterprise social solutions as standalone systems, the vision for most includes enterprise social tools that are deeply integrated with adjacent collaboration, content, portal, and productivity applications in the environment. Increasingly, these strategies include a social layer to “social-enable” applications.

Having a single integrated platform with a built-in social network makes it easy to build activity streams.

Social activity streams are a bridge to this enterprise social vision. They connect workers to each other and to information. On its own, the information workplace lacks a mechanism that pulls together events, along with their context, background, and required actors, in a manner that is attractive and easily consumable for knowledge workers. This is where the activity stream comes in.

Following the worker in the activity stream

The need to take action comes to users in their activity stream. This puts the user in the center of their own workflow. Each situational process has its own activity stream, but each user only needs to see the pieces that apply to them, thereby improving their attention allocation.

Since there is no “application” for users to go to in order to do their work, work must follow the worker.

Adding context to the activity stream

When the action surfaces in the activity stream, it comes with enough information and context, including data, comments and documents, to help users successfully complete the required activity without leaving their activity stream.

This leads to information being captured as it is created. Any information related to the action taken by the user is captured and stored within the context of that action, so that it is there for later use as well as to provide an audit trail and for process improvement.

Taking action from inside the activity stream

The activity stream becomes actionable in the sense that users can take actions within the context of the activity stream — instead of going to different applications to get different tasks done, all applications aggregate within the activity stream and tasks can be completed right from the activity stream as they come up.

Situational application to-dos simply appear as another interaction type in the worker’s activity stream, allowing them to take action within the flow of their day.

So when a worker needs to respond to an item in the activity stream through an application, they don’t need to toggle away to the application.

For example, a manager needs to approve an expense report: instead of going to the expense reporting application, the request will simply show up in their activity stream, along with any associated notes, attachments, and a direct link to the record being acted upon.

This allows workers to interact as they normally would in the social environment, and process steps simply appear as another interaction type, and can be done within the flow of their day.

Since workers are usually working on multiple applications at the same time, having work come to their activity stream provides them with a single point of access for them to do their work. Instead of the user going from application to application to complete their tasks, the tasks appear in the user’s activity stream as needed.

For more information about eliminating process silos, visit www.work-relay.com