"The provision of tools alone will not change user behavior," said Ringo Chiu, CIO at SFC. "You can provide the best thing on earth to help them work together but users are used to their own silos and ways of working." Technology and tools are the final part of the problem, argued Chiu. "Addressing [the] culture, company direction and attitude is critical." He stressed the need to create the right culture, correct governance and proper process planning to foster closer collaboration.

Once these are in place, firms can identify areas with common objectives to build processes and workflow, then apply technology to enable the process. "But this is not a CIO problem alone," said Chiu. "It's also up to CEOs or COOs to push this as well."

When it comes to implementing initiatives and tools, Chiu believes that past technology lacked the necessary functions to enable the required sharing and collaboration. Many companies understand that staff often view knowledge sharing as an additional administration task to their daily routine, noted Chiu. He said that tools are not usually integrated into daily operations and systems that require staff to log information via another interface or system.

"There must be direct links or interfaces from production applications like email to the central data repository or portal," added Chiu.

Embedding collaboration