Connecting Organizational Silos: Taking Knowledge Flow Management to the Next Level with Social Media

INTERACTION TRENDS

In recent years it has become harder to say exactly what is inside an organization and what is outside. Companies have outsourced not only standard processes but also processes like innovation, sometimes having the crowd help them develop a service or product. Also, the complexity of interaction means that teams between one organization and its partners become rather close. Where there was a fairly clear boundary between companies only a couple of decades ago, some cross-organizational teams are more closely related than similar teams internal to the same organization. It could also be that a cross-organizational team is competing with an internal team in a different division of that same team. This not only goes for partners—in some cases, the lines are blurry between an organization and its customers as well. The defining element is not structure but topic (e.g., work product, project, know-how) and interactions move from competition to coopetition (see Exhibit 9.1).

Exhibit 9.1 From Competition to Coopetition

As these cross-organizational collaborations need communication, it is clear that this will have an effect on the scope of ESNs. Actually, that term might be not completely correct at that point, unless you see those partners as an extension of an enterprise’s ecosystem. Then again, it is usually still the enterprise that runs it and decides on the type ...