Breaking down knowledge silos

[DavidBReynolds]

One of the biggest barriers to sharing knowledge is "siloing" or keeping information private: some teams will use easily accessible and sharable knowledge bases but a few groups refuse to participate. Instead, they use a different system, keeping their information behind locked doors so it is only accessible to a few people.

I gave up trying to persuade team to create and update articles on their product. I just recently became aware of a second team doing the same type of thing.

\Job security and fear of losing control are two of the biggest reasons why some groups don't participate.

My question is, being a writer and not a manager, what can I do? The lack of knowledge sharing hurts the entire company but nothing I've been able to share with my manager has made any difference.

How do you deal with teams or business units who aren't willing to adopt the knowledge base method of information sharing?

I need to use persuasion since I'm at the bottom of the organization chart. I'd like to use an argument or two that you used and worked in similar situations.

Thank-you all for your comments. 

[Eoghan Sinnott]

Hi David, 

Yes this is definitely an extremely common problem. Job security always seem to be the biggest fear factor in other areas when it comes to opening up and sharing their knowledge. 

Some teams just won’t budge no matter how many times you explain the bigger picture.

What’s worked before for me is focusing on what they care about: saving time and avoiding repeat work. If it's in an IT area you can try and see if you can spot any repeat issues or trends of low value, time consuming issues and come with the approach of 
“what if we wrote something up for this one issue? It might cut down how often people escalate it to you.”

Once that article goes live and they actually see a drop in volume, that’s when the lightbulb goes off. Suddenly knowledge sharing isn’t about “extra work,” it’s about having the time to spend on higher value items. 

It’s not instant, but that little proof of value can change the whole tone of the conversation.

That can also help with the "influencing up" side of things. You may not have the authority to demand their buy in, but when they see proof of the process working it will work in your favour.  

Then you can use it as a good news story and make the team look good. "You're expertise in this area and creating the knowledge doc saved 'X' amount of minutes because it was used this many times this month". Even getting one person from a team to adopt this approach can have a knock on effect, other team members/manager sees the impact and they then want to buy in. 

You're not alone in this struggle and it doesn't change overnight, but I've definitely had more and more success with this kind of strategy in our environment. 

Regards,

Eoghan. 

[Coralyn Notting]

To build on this, what we've found to be really useful is to have a clear definition of what goes in our employee portal/ end-user knowledge bases. For us, knowledge is a resource (not a training) that helps solve common end user problems, needs a high level/ volume of visibility, and is unlikely to change often (like once every few months is fine, but this is not a space for collaboration).

The definition helps people to see that we're not trying to "take away" their specialization--instead we want to answer those questions that they keep getting that would save them time to work on the bigger stuff. 

Our company still uses SharePoint and Teams sites. The larger culture change will take time, and people need to see and experience the change before they're sold on it. (And yes, knowledge champions in business units really does help. After all, knowledge management is all about bridge building.)

[David Kay]

"Pirate" repositories are the bane of every KM professional.  From a glass-half-full perspective, at least it's a demonstration that the people involved understand the value of capturing and sharing knowledge...
Along with all the other excellent suggestions in this thread, check to see if their repository is just easier for them.  Sometimes Confluence or OneNote (for example) just feels a lot quicker than using the official KB.
If this is a contributing factor, see what you can do to make it easier to do the right thing.  Is your KM technology integrated into their workflow?  Is setting metadata kept to an absolute minimum? Are your templates logical and easy to fill in?  Is your content standard straightforward?  Can you use AI to help automate article creation?
We often underestimate how much of a barrier one or two extra clicks or copy / pastes can be to doing the right thing.

[STREETFACTS]

This is a great post, I never would have suspected that KM would be affected in this matter. I'm currently researching this KM area. 

This is not a situation to be taken lightly, how bad of a job market could an industry be that employees weaponize knowledge.

 From a leadership perspective ;
- Focus your message on "Cost savings from reduced redundant work"
- Revenue impact of faster decision-making
- Innovation output metrics

From measurable results - Productivity Metrics:
- Time-to-resolution for recurring issues
- Reduction in duplicate work/research efforts
- Speed of onboarding new employees
- First-call resolution rates

From an internal culture - Making Sharing Beneficial:
- Recognition programs for knowledge contributors
- Career advancement tied to knowledge leadership
- Peer nomination systems for expertise sharing
- Public dashboards showing contribution impact

Make "Silos" and hoarding painful:
- Implement "bus factor" metrics (what happens if key people leave?)
- Track knowledge bottlenecks that delay projects
- Create cross-functional dependency mapping
- Use collaboration requirements in performance 

[David Kay]

One thing to factor in to this list is the effect of self-service. Knowledge can greatly increase the scale at which you can deliver support, and it can remove contacts that are of lower value to you and customers from the cases or incidents.  
So as you do a better job of self-service, the issues that remain in assisted support become, on average, more challenging--you've gotten rid of many of the easy or redundant ones.  This is great, but some of the metrics you mention (time to resolution and first contact resolution, for example) will go the "wrong" way--which is a good thing.  It's important to set executives' expectations about this.