Managing in silos

Let’s elaborate on the siloed organizations and challenges associated with such structures. Applications are engineered and developed in an effort to address the functional requirements as well as non-functional application-related requirements. Infrastructures are engineered, developed and managed with the aim to manage technology components within those infrastructures. There may exist more than one ‘release’ channels into production. Senior leadership and management, both within the businesses as well as IT receive largely disconnected information that does not enable intelligent decision-making.

In the middle of such chaos, unfortunately, you also come across leaders that are unable to appreciate the new generation of challenges that their business enterprises face and want to force obsolete ways of managing IT. Combination of these and other similar barriers lead to a non-delivery of those exact services that IT exists to deliver and that are required by our business customers.

This cycle creates an overall negative impact on what IT stands for and promises to deliver i.e., enabling business processes in an effective and efficient manner. In this blog, we will discuss these challenges in further details and will also, at a high-level, review how business service management can address these and other related challenges.

Following sloes contribute negatively to the overall realization of service culture:

1.     Silo-ed Vision and Leadership: Silo-ed vision and leadership at an IT level can result in lack of alignment between IT components thereby comprosing on the overall value that IT exists to deliver.

2.     Silo-ed Engineering and Development: End-to-end service management requires integrated approach to managing application development and infrastructure engineering.

3.     Silo-ed Technology Management: If we continue to manage technology in siloes, our business and customers will continue to face challenges in meeting their desired business outcomes.

4.     Silo-ed Request Management: All functions with IT organization must operate in harmony in order to ensure management of service requests required to meet service targets.

5.     Silo-ed Reporting and Communication Management: Siloed management results in siloed-reporting and communication management.

6.     Silo-ed Supplier Management: If we are managing our suppliers in siloes, it will present significant risks to the overall realization of agreed targets.

In my upcoming blogs, we will discuss the above-mentioned silo-ed thinking across various domains in greater details and will try to establish a better appreciation on the impact of such siloes on business outcomes.