The Silo Effect

Over the last few years a term has crept into business and managerial circles for a condition that we've being especially feeling the effects from within technology. It's the Silo effect.

The name comes from farm silos which house different types of grain. Analogous to political divisions within large organisations which represent the departments. Each department has its own clearly defined internal structure. Communication flows from the lower level staff to the department head. In larger organisations there may be several levels of management within each Silo. Communication between departments or silos only occurs at the top level and then usually only during formal meetings with all department heads present. 

Abandoned Grain Silo

This deficiency of communication causes departmental thinking to lack ideas and information from other departments feeding off only creativity from within the silo. It propagates feelings of self importance and keeps the power of synergy from working; the idea that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. Each silo comes to believe that it is the dominant structure bidding against other silos for shares of capital with which to further its empire. Often without realising it the organisation is in competition with itself which leads to a self destructive spiral driven by insular thinking of self preservation. Viewing the organisation as an organism it as if its own immune system has turned on it.

The Silo effect for IT systems and services of the organisation is often pronounced and one with which I've had first hand experience on a number of occasions.
Going by a many different nomenclatures, the IT support / services teams role is to provide the Information Technology services which the organisation can utilise to conduct its business. Depending upon the type of organisation these services can be seen as little more than tools to help get the job done or in the case of businesses like Amazon are integral to the very business model they rely on.
In any case these services and systems are becoming exponentially more complex and interconnected as we take advantage of the acceleration provided by Moore's law.
Staff within the IT support / services team are the most qualified and experienced with all aspects of IT hardware and software and should be the team that chooses which platforms and applications etc. to adopt for the good of the business.

This however is often not the case. The Silo effect causes elements within each team to dictate which IT tools they require. Little regard if any is placed upon how that requested platform or application will interoperate with existing technology in other departments which ultimately must share and access similar data.

Usually it goes something like this, the finance director requests a new application at a senior staff meeting. They've recently hired a new finance exec and he informs them that this software offers features which their current one doesn't and besides he's used it for many years and most of their competition use it. They have already been in touch with a sales partner for the application and only require paperwork signing to complete the purchase. The IT support team will be provided with the application when it arrives and will be expected install, manage and support this new product.
At no point were the IT support team called in to consult with the finance team on whether this new product was the best way to go, whether the partner outlet was the best place to procure or how it would interoperate with existing technology.

The result is often a mix of software systems demanded by different departments which are not designed to talk together leaving the IT support team to hire additional specialist staff, train existing staff and spend significant amounts of time ensuring that data can flow from one app to the next often by writing their own code to ensure it does. Of course it never works properly, is in a constant state of flux and the IT services team get a bad name.
Occasionally it works in reverse with IT services wanting to deploy new innovative technology across the organisation which will reduce TCO but the silos respond with claims that work they do requires existing systems and it would be impossible to change.

In my experience more often than not an analysis of benefits gained by adopting new requested software against the TCO over a measured period is not undertaken.
There is no disputing that the new software requested by xyz department will benefit the organisation because it offers new features which will increase productivity for that silo. But there is a case to be made that in enabling this new software to be interoperable with the rest of the technology in terms of how it is deployed, secured and outputs its data within n-tier platforms, we incur a greater cost than can be gained.

Until organisational structures are changed and silos broken, IT service teams will never be able to provide the best end-to-end solutions to take their businesses into the next era and many organisations which are not agile enough and working together at an inter-departmental level simply will not survive.