I read this interesting article yesterday on HBR blogs titled “The First Two Steps Toward Breaking Down Silos”, in which the author writes:
“When we ask executives, What is the number one innovation killer at your company?, one of the first words we always hear, always, is “silos!” Recently, one executive even muttered, “fortresses.”
Business silos, just like agricultural silos hold something important and make it hard to get at. That’s good when you’re protecting wheat and corn from rain & snow. But it’s bad when you’re trying to innovate across departments and divisions. And the bigger the company the more harmful a role silos play. Silos create an environment where sharing and collaborating for anything other than one silo’s special interests is virtually impossible.”
[Original article here: Courtesy HBR]
Great article, I highly recommend reading it. It brings up an excellent point, which is equally applicable in the IT world: ‘Silos’ hinder team-work and innovation. The rest of my post ties this point to the operation of an IT team within an organization.
IT teams in larger organizations are structured based on the functions they perform. Examples include the ‘Networks (Monitoring) team’, which is responsible for managing the quality of network infrastructure and the ‘Applications (Monitoring) team’, which is responsible for the application availability and so on. While modularizing into smaller teams may help maintain focus and build expertise, having no collaboration across these teams creates a ‘silo-ed environment’. This prevents the teams to share information and understand the big picture. This poses a big challenge to businesses in today’s complex IT architecture where there is tight dependencies between IT functions (such as application performance dependent on network connectivity).
When a problem occurs, it is imperative that the IT teams involved to detect and rectify the problem are able to view dependencies and information flow across the IT system. This would allow them to understand the root cause of the problem in the right context and devise the solution. In order to boost productivity, it is essential that the monitoring / System Management tool that the IT team uses, gives them this visibility cutting across various IT functions. This can cut down time to detect the problem and help them (IT) respond to it faster.
Unless IT leaders looks at such productive ways, IT teams will continue to spend time on finding the ‘real problem’ and not innovations, which can truly help the business gear up for the future.
Do you have a similar experience? I would love to hear it, please share.
