Derek Miers writes what may be the 1,000,001st indictment of silos in Silos and Functional Decomposition:
I think we would all agree that BPM and business architecture set out to overcome the issues associated with silos. And I think we would also agree that the problems associated with silos derive from functional decomposition.
While strategy development usually takes a broad, organization-wide view, so many change programs still cater to the sub-optimization perspectives of individual silos. Usually, these individual change programs consist of projects that deal with the latest problem to rise to the top of the political agenda — effectively applying a Band-Aid to fix a broken customer-facing process or put out a fire associated with some burning platform.
Silo-based thinking is endemic to Western culture — it’s everywhere. This approach to management is very much a command-and-control mentality injected into our culture by folks like Smith, Taylor, Newton and Descartes. Let’s face it: the world has moved on, and the network is now far more important than the hierarchy.
But guess what technique about 99.9% of us use to fix the problems associated with functional decomposition? You guessed it: yet more functional decomposition. I think Einstein had something to say about using the same techniques and expecting different results. This is a serious groupthink problem!
When we use functional decomposition to model processes, we usually conflate the organizational structure with the work itself. Rather than breaking down the silos, this approach reinforces them — effectively putting them on steroids. And when other techniques emerge that explicitly remove the conflation of process and organizational structure, those who are wedded to old ways of thinking come out of the woodwork to shoot them down. Examples include role activity diagrams (Martyn Ould), value networks (Verna Allee), and capability mapping (various authors, including Forrester analysts).
Or it may be silo indictment #1,000,002, it is hard to keep an accurate count.
I don’t doubt a word that Derek says, although I might put a different emphasis on parts of it.
But in any case, let’s just emphasize agreement that silos are a problem.
Now what?