Comments on: Silo APIs?

By: Clark

Clark — Mon, 06 Feb 2017 16:03:53 +0000

Thanks for the feedback! Jeff, your experience in the startup seems like a valuable direction to go: create a culture of sharing and learning together, and L&D facilitating rather than being the fount. Ian, agree that desiloization would make sense. Others (e.g. Kotter in Accelerate) argue that you have a cross-conversation in addition to the silos. Perhaps it’s needed in large, existing orgs, but others argue that those orgs will devolve. We’ll see! Thanks for the feedback.

By: Ian Gardner

Ian Gardner — Mon, 06 Feb 2017 13:10:26 +0000

Thanks for the interesting post Clark. I think it is trying to tackle similar problems to one I recently posted (https://whoseeducationisitanyway.me/2016/11/13/time-for-a-rethink-on-support-services/).

It feels, to me, more and more like the departmental silos that have evolved over the years need to break down and, presumably, many flatter more project-oriented organizations are leading the way here. The mindset needs to be one of openness for example via social platforms, like Jeff’s comment, mixing as you suggest or other forms of working out loud.

By: Jeff Sant

Jeff Sant — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 19:46:51 +0000

I do think much of what needs to be trained / learned within a corporate environment resides in the heads of people within that organization. This issue is how to get information from those who know it to those who need it in an efficient and effective manner. I co-founded a software company that had various divisions involving R&D, sales/marketing, implementations, support, engineering, etc. We first started to attack the issue of training via a centralized L&D function whose job was to work with key content owners to access and organization information, and to then deliver such content to those who need it in an effective way. At our start-up, things just moved too fast for that to be efficient and people needed answers now while being on-the-job. We ended up putting together a more social interactive platform where those who had questions posted them, and those who had answers answered them. The information was saved and organized. We created incentives for people to interact and answer questions through reward and recognition programs. This proved to be effective with much of the content and left the L&D function focused on foundational knowledge for new employees.