How to Combat Silos

As discussed in Why Silos Must be Busted, we covered how silos can hurt a business and the impacts they may have. In this post, we will discuss some of the common ways to combat silos and break down these barriers.

While combating silos may be complex, the benefits are very real. Here are some tips to help you start breaking down these barriers and driving efficiency:

• Encourage cross-departmental collaboration
  • Encourage teams to collaborate and work together on items
  • For initiatives, ensure stakeholders from all relevant orgs are there
• Implement cross-functional teams
  • In some cases, this may occur organically, if so perfect
  • However, if you have systemic compartmentalization, form cross-functional teams to help combat these silos
• Ensure openness and access to systems (where legally possible)
  • This can be achieved by:
    • Using a system of record that centralizes or mashes-up data (this is ideal if feasible)
    • Leveraging automation for ETL/ELT between systems (this has opportunity cost)
    • Providing access across systems (this can be expensive given licensing costs)
  • Follow regulations and rules regarding which data can be visible
    • For example, not everyone can see forecast or sales data with SOX compliance. With HIPPA and PII data, there must be limits on what everyone can see.
• Centralize efforts on the outcome, not the organization
  • Encourage and enforce cross-functional teams
  • Focus on the outcomes; if you’re trying to build a new service for public consumption, garner stakeholders from relevant teams and work together to drive the outcome
  • We would be remiss to assume we can fully manage things on our own
  • For example, say you launch a new feature but have no marketing, docs, or sales enablement? What would the impact be?
  • Now, imagine you had collaborated with the docs team to write up docs, the marketing team to get advertising and the sales team to start selling it. What would the impact be now?
• Encourage leadership support
  • Leadership can play a big role in breaking down silos by promoting collaboration and open communication and encouraging cross-functional teamwork
  • This doesn’t work without getting leaders on board
• Focus on the customer
  • Encourage employees to think about their businesses customers and how to suit them best
  • At the end of the day, the more empathy we can have for the customer, the more inclined we will be to work across boundaries to provide an exceptional experience

TL;DR

• Combat silos and make (or encourage) cross-functional teams.
• Ensure efficient interfaces between components (teams, systems, orgs, etc.) - similar to well-defined APIs for microservices
• Automate data movement between systems of record or leverage a system that can pull into a single system of record