I will start this with an analogy, but don’t worry, unlike Drax, I know the difference between an analogy and a metaphor… (yes, that is a Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 reference)
If you look at all of the systems in an automobile, you have:
- Safety systems (airbags, ABS, pre-collision stop, etc.)
- Power generation (engine/battery)
- Power distribution (drive shaft, differential)
- Suspension
- Etc.
Just in the engine alone, you have:
- Pistons
- Intake valves
- Exhaust valves
- Spark plugs
- Mix controllers (O2 + fuel)
- Etc.
Now, what happens if any of those items don’t work in perfect synchrony? Will the car perform maximally? No. The engine will start to misfire and potentially fail to run. At an even more drastic level, if a collision detection system doesn’t tell the engine to stop and the fuel system to stop feeding, there can be very drastic consequences.
Similar to the automobile that can face catastrophic failure due to lack of coordination, the same applies for many real-world scenarios, including our (and your) business. Breaking down these barriers, driving coordination and collaboration are paramount. Failure to do so can lead to gross inefficiency and drastic consequences, impacting the company’s financials, profitability, or viability.
A Real-World Example
When I joined Nutanix in 2011, there was no shipping product, no customers, and the product didn’t work; we had a ton of work ahead of us to build the product. At this point, everyone was in a single room on Technology Dr. in San Jose, CA. It was the “early days” all startups go through.
As the product progressed and became more viable, we added an Ops/IT teams to help make sure things didn’t go down. Initially, our engineering team supported our customers, but that couldn’t scale, so we added a support team (and added a ticketing tool). Secondly, we listened to our initial customers and, with them, evolved the product into something we could start promoting and selling. Next, we hired marketing and sales teams to market and sell the product (again, adding more tools: SFDC and Marketo).
Given everyone was initially together, it was effortless to collaborate and communicate as you could yell (or walk) over to the person if you had a question. However, as the company grew, we started to see knowledge gaps and organizational silos begin to form. Each team had its own system(s); sales had its room, marketing was on the other side of the building, and they became further segmented over time. It was almost as if we were purposefully trying to build barriers.
As the company grew, this problem became exacerbated, and these barriers became more fortified. So while throwing more resources at the problem can “help,” this is not fixing the real problem and doesn’t help productivity per individual.
Unfortunately, many leaders like to hold knowledge close to the chest and as leverage. Their silos are leverage, or so they believe. However, while they may believe that will help their little fiefdom, this is detrimental to the business or the company’s overall good. After discussing with numerous individuals and businesses, it was clear this was not just specific to our business; it is pervasive among companies of all sizes.
How Does This Look Like In Your Business?
When you think about a company, there are a lot of moving pieces as well:
- Engineering
- Support
- Sales
- Marketing
- IT
- HR
- Finance and Accounting
- Etc.
All of these units need to work in unison to ensure maximal efficiency. If they are not in coordination, you see the impacts through inefficiency and, worse case, the company’s failure (yes, very drastic, however possible).
Whether by design or misfortune, companies are often biased toward creating silos. For example, as they grow they add new departments, new departments and new leaders commonly bring their own systems of record, and those departments can grow to need their “own space”.
The following figure shows a sample of the various teams/systems you commonly see:
In this model each “team” has their own systems and accounts are commonly not shared across teams either due to license constraints, the preference to work in their “console”, lack of knowledge, or plain not knowing any better. These systems commonly have little to no integration, leading to duplication, inconsistency and lack of coordination across teams given they all see things differently.
Scenario
For instance, say a customer has a problem and contacts support to file a ticket via a support portal relating to a product issue:
- Customer files ticket via support portal (ZenDesk SFDC ServiceCloud, etc.)
- SRE 1 works with customer to get logs, context, etc. and appends to ticket
- SRE 1 escalates to engineering on-call by creating an on-call in engineering work system (e.g JIRA)
- Engineer 1 may not have access to support system as they are commonly licensed on a per-seat basis
- Engineer 1 asks support to send over detail/context about ticket and customer and attach to on-call
- Support sends or attaches detail to the on-call
- Now, say another customer has the same problem and creates another ticket worked on by another SRE 2
- SRE 2 may escalate ticket 2 to engineering as a completely separate on-call
- Engineer 2 has to review ticket 2 and may ask for more detail, again
- Engineers 1 and 2 may see them as two different problems as each may have different detail/context
- At this point the sales rep for the customer may not even know their customer has filed a ticket
- The support agent may also not know if there are some large pending deals with the customer requiring good service to close
- Customer asks sales rep for an update on the ticket
- Sales rep has to scramble and figure out what ticket they are actually referring to
- …
In the above example, it is clear that lack of access across systems or lack of a “single source of truth” for all was detrimental for everyone. Not only does this lead to a lot of duplication and miscoordination, but it can also have very tangible impacts and impact customer experience and potential sales. As the company size grows these inefficiencies and impacts can grow substantially.
A corporate game of telephone As you can see the following problems are visible:
- Lack of coordination between teams -> inefficienct back and forth iteration
- Duplication of context/work given separate systems/SOR
- All is reactive
- Context switching during gaps
- A much longer time to resolution
- A lot of work “suck”
How Does This Impact Me?
In general, the following impacts or consequences commonly occur:
- Lack of coordination and inefficiency
- Commonly each organization has their own plans and roadmaps and much work is done in isolation
- The lack of coordination leads to potentially misaligned efforts or in gross duplication of work
- Given each is operating in a silo, this also leads to inconsistency across depertments
- Knowledge barriers/gaps
- While some may treat knowledge/information as leverage (this is bad), this leads to politics, and neither is beneficial for the business
- Commonly you’ll see users only have access to their systems, but lack access to other systems
- For example, an Engineer may have access to their work system (e.g., JIRA, DevRev, etc.) but no access to the support system (ZenDesk, SFDC Service Cloud, DevRev)
- When a support person “escalates” the ticket, they commonly create a completely separate item
- Your access to the data in the support system is vulnerable to whatever information the support person put in your system
- Similarily, a sales rep may have access to their CRM (SFDC, HubSport), but no access to the support or work systems.
- This leads to inconsistent context and lack of the “whole picture”
- Poor employee experience
- Silos can garner a competitive rather than collaborative nature
- Knowing that something an employee has worked on was duplicated by another can be demoralizing
- Given the lack of full context and the ever constant game of telephone between teams, this can lead to a lot of “work suck”
- Poor customer experience
- There’s nothing worse (well maybe) than having a problem and talking to a support person, then your sales rep who has no idea about what the support person is doing
- This commonly leads to inconsistent messaging which can give a poor picture to the customer about internal coordination and ability to execute
But that’s “not my problem”… Well, are you sure?
Let’s take the perspective from a few different personas:
- Support Engineer
- How would you handle it differently if you knew there were some opportunities or deals with the customer?
- What if you didn’t have to copy and paste between engineering issues and your tickets?
- What if you could easily see the status of an escalation and/or have that status propagated to the ticket?
- Sales Rep
- What if you had visibility and could easily see the problems your customers were having and get notified when they had them?
- What if you could use deal size to put emphasis on certain fixes?
- What if you could easily see the status of things your customers care about or be notified about new things engineering is pushing out?
- Customer Success
- What if you had a single place for true visibility for your customer’s tickets, opportunities, and engineering issues relevant to them?
- If you could provide a much more coordinated experience, how would that impact your customer’s experience?
- If there was a system that enabled sharing of context, how much manual coordination effort could that save you?
- Finance
- How much does context switching or inefficiency cost you?
- If you could remove 30 minutes of work waste daily, how much money would that save you opportunity cost-wise?
- What is the cost of someone being 20% less productive? What about at the company scale?
- Human Resources (HR)
- How does inefficiency or lack of knowledge impact your employee’s morale?
- Does manual “work suck” have an impact on their well-being?
- What if you could enable them to be more productive? Would that boost morale?
Whether we like it or not, silos impact everyone in the business, either directly or indirectly. These genuinely affect productivity, experience, efficiency, and the bottom line. So, how much is inefficiency costing your business?
We felt all these problems at our previous companies and had the desire to answer the questions above, which led us to try and build something that could bring things together via DevRev.
How to Combat
To learn more about how to combat silos visit HERE
TL;DR
- Many types of silos exist in a company (departmental, knowledge, system, role, etc…)
- Silos hurt efficiency and productivity
- While some fiefdom leaders may believe their “silo” gives them power, this is detrimental to the business
- By ensuring a common context across teams, and consolidating access and/or truth, true efficiency can be gained