I was part of an interesting discussion this past week on Twitter about silos. The assertion was that Twitter is YAS (yet another silo) and not particularly different from email or instant messaging in that way. Here's why I think that's mostly wrong.
We in the ECM world have long railed against all the silos in the rganization: the departmental repositories, the file shares, and the process-specific applications like case or agenda management. And perhaps the worst offender is email, which in essence creates a silo for every individual in the organization (actually, for every user account, which likely means even more silos). To break down the barriers between silos we argue for, with apologies to Tolkien,
"One suite to rule them all,
One suite to find them,
One suite to bring them all and in the enterprise bind them."
Enter social media. Most of the tools were created for a specific purpose: short updates, posting pictures, or sharing documents. If users found a particular tool useful, or found a tool appropriate to a particular use case, they had to create accounts for each tool and use each tool separately. This is disturbingly similar to Silo 1.0, above.
But I think it's premature to call Silo 2.0 on Twitter etc. I'd previously discussed (http://aiimcommunities.org/erm/blog/single-identity) the notion of identity platforms and federation across tools, and this is part of the key. One of the things that makes these tools different from many more traditional applications is the ability to federate your identity across platforms and websites. Facebook and Twitter in particular provide well-supported mechanisms to authenticate to other applications. So from an individual user's point of view it is not as difficult to connect to many applications with a single sign on, reducing the number of silos the user perceives.
It's also the case that most social media tools default to public access to the primary content created. Twitter posts, Facebook updates, etc. are all public unless the user chooses to lock them down. Inside the enterprise, this is not always the case (where "public" = available to everyone in the organization) but the argument can be made that private/sensitive/confidential could be the exception as it is outside the firewall. In both cases the net effect is to lower, if not remove, the silos.
Finally, the move towards consolidation of publishing continues. From Friendfeed, to Ping.fm, to Twitter and Facebook's extension into other tools, it is increasingly easy to get all updates from your services, and your friends' services, in one place. This is about as far from a silo as you can get.
A lot of issues remain with social media tools as they apply to records and information management: whether they are records, what exactly forms the record, how to manage records effectively, etc. But I think it's premature to saddle them with the "Silo 2.0" term.
#ElectronicRecordsManagement #facebook #twitter #silo