Workforce Management Featured Article
Ending Team Silos By Improving Process Flows
Establishing communications links between software tools, as well as humans, can help prevent dangerous “team silos” from gaining a foothold in your organization.
In his keynote presentation on the first day of the New Intelligence Expo in Fort Lauderdale yesterday, Hugo chief executive officer Josh Lowy from Hugo talked about workflow process improvements you can use to tie different departments together electronically.
In a nod to his native Australia, Lowy and his team call their concept Boomerang Flows. Lowy says you can apply his firm’s Boomerang Flow software to help eliminate data silos from inhabiting your business.
According to Lowy, the average organization has more than 200 software tools residing in their systems. More than 90% of those tools are team specific, meaning they’re unavailable to the entire organizations.
Lowy’s aim is to make the information in those silos available to everyone who can benefit from seeing the data. As an example of the value of process improvement, Lowy spoke about exposing his business calendar to others in the organization to increase efficiency.
Hugo provides meeting-note software that you can distribute company wide. The company’s goal with Boomerang Flow is to describe how information is supposed to flow efficiently across teams, then employ digital tools that let allow meeting notes to be shared across platforms.
Since the meeting note software is used company wide, there’s no learning curve when team members notes are shared within the organization. “Different teams can be looped in just by using the tools they use every day,” Lowry says.
Organizing the loop – creating the workflow - is key. Lowry says you need to figure out who gets looped into what type of information, then make sure they can access the information using the platforms they typically employ.
Lowry says the goal is to establish “equal communications between tools, not just between people.” When different teams use different tools within the same organization, the development of information silos is the result. Distributing software tools throughout the organizations is the most effective way to combat information silos, according to Lowry.
Edited by Maurice Nagle
