Solutions to silos: Joining up knowledge

Silo organization and professional tensions have undermined attempts to share knowledge across the public sector. The failure to share knowledge and information has been the cause of serious public sector service failures. While reorganization, partnerships, performance management and strong regulation each play an important role in public service improvement, none on its own will bring about sufficiently enhanced knowledge management practices. High-quality public sector leadership, which demands and rewards a culture of knowledge sharing within the organization and with other public sector bodies, is the key to good knowledge management. This, in turn, is necessary to achieve the scale of public service improvement demanded by the government.