Information Brokerage

mechanism

Information brokerage creates value by making useful work travel across organizational silos. The broker gains visibility not by originating every insight, but by finding, packaging, and routing insights that would otherwise remain local.

At Veritas, valuable work was already happening across the company—and still going to waste because one group did not know what another was doing. The useful intervention was not another technical project, but a publication: Tech Forum, which made the scattered work visible.

The gap between knowing and being known

Silos create an information asymmetry: each group sees its own work but lacks a map of the wider organization. A broker crosses those boundaries, recognizes which local discoveries matter elsewhere, and packages them in a form other groups can absorb. That translation turns isolated activity into shared organizational knowledge.

The broker benefits too. Each useful connection demonstrates access, selection, and judgment—the dynamics behind Discovery Leads to Status. Over time, people begin sending information to the broker and looking to them for information, strengthening their position as a node in the network.

Where it shows up

Tech Forum at Veritas

Writing up the work of otherwise disconnected groups created a shared window into the company. The value came from circulating existing knowledge across boundaries, not claiming ownership of the underlying work.

No gap, no brokerage

This mechanism depends on real separation. If groups already exchange the relevant information directly, an intermediary adds little. Brokerage also requires selection: merely repeating everything does not solve the visibility problem, because the useful signal remains buried.

Publish one cross-silo brief

Tomorrow, ask two teams what they are building, what they recently learned, and what help they need. Turn the answers into a short, attributed note and send each team the item most relevant to the other. Do this repeatedly only where the connection produces something useful.

Episodes that teach this

How Introverts Can Win The Networking Game! FutureIQ · explained at 5:18 7,620 views
At Veritas, different groups were doing interesting work but "one group doesn't know what the other group is doing," so he wrote it up as Tech Forum.