One of the biggest challenges we run into is the siloing of information in an organization. Problems aren’t surfaced. Solutions aren’t shared. There is no ubiquitous language to describe things, so confusion can abound even when different parts of an organization communicate.

Breaking down these silos and building bridges is always important to create solutions that both work and will be adopted.

Finding Champions

Good news. If you have done some research with your internal users, you are on your way to ensuring you hear everyone’s voice. Each of those subsidiary groups is its own silo, and by bringing them to the table to talk, you’re helping to bridge those gaps.

You can do the same for silos of expertise: developers, designers, content writers (including that prolific professor who finds time to keep a blog up to date). While the organization’s workflow may encourage such silos, nothing is stopping you from reaching out between them, and (ideally) most people doing a job love talking about it.

Are you interested in what the CMS is capable of so that you can optimally design content for it? Reach out to a developer and get a walkthrough. Bring lots of questions. The reality is that they are probably just as frustrated with being silo’d as you are.

Frame it around wanting to make their life easier. Nobody likes being faced with solutions that someone else created which don’t bring your expertise and needs into play. If you are listening to them, people will generally be responsive to the work you are doing.

As you reach across silos, you will start to identify people who are just as interested in making working solutions as you are. These are people who are willing to be champions for your cause. Hold onto them for dear life. They will become your eyes, ears, and voice within their respective silos. Their motivations might not align with your own precisely, but that’s fine. In one project, an agency accepted the shared platform because it was 100% accessible. We wanted it accessible because we believe that accessibility is a human right. The agency wanted it to be accessible because they didn’t want to be sued. Because of that common goal, they were willing to work on a solution.

At the same time, you need to be a champion for your champions within the groups you are involved in. Breaking down silos goes both ways. As this group of champions starts to elevate everyone’s voice throughout the organization, the walls will crumble.

Collaboration on Difficult Problems

After you have your team of champions, collaborate with them on solutions to problems you couldn’t have solved yourself. One common example is the development of a structured content model.

It’s hard enough to design a content model that fits an organization’s needs. When you are dealing with an archipelago, it becomes even more daunting. Any model you design must be broad enough to apply to multiple internal organizations, each of which has specific interests and priorities.

Finding commonalities is still important. You might identify shared content types like Faculty, Course, Degree, and Location. But you still have to allow for flexibility.

In reality, this means most content is going to end up as basic WYSIWYG page-building content. That means lots of unstructured content. How do you make sure this content doesn’t become an unmaintainable mess?

In conjunction with developers and designers, you develop a set of guardrails for the WYSIWYG editor. Make the “wrong way” hard and make the “right way” easiest. Some examples:

• Restricted photo placement and dimensions
• Embedding micro-content with a variety of options
• Advanced document management that makes it easy to use and list files

Breaking down silos is not easy or quick. Nevertheless, the benefits are immense. It enables everyone to craft better solutions for your users, and it increases the likelihood of your tools being adopted.