Problem of Siloed IT in Organizations

What are Siloeds?

An organizational silo is the isolation between employees or entire departments within an organization where either they do not have the adequate means to or they do not want to share knowledge or information with each other. Employees often work in isolation at last away from rest of the company which in turn leads to a bulk of issues and problems both internally as well as externally for the employees themselves, the executives, the partners as well as the customers of the organization. It leads to inefficiency, duplicity in work, and bugs in the work.

Problem of Siloed IT in Organizations

Once an organization is large, departments usually start splitting up and lack of communication emerges. In the IT sector, different departments are busy doing their own work, like the software engineers are busy with fixing bugs, polishing and perfecting their software and refactoring code, the technology department is busy protecting engineers and technologists from outside attacks. Customer-facing staff members are tackling angry users demanding fixes and features in their services used and complaints for lack of product support, while the top management are out of the technology decisions. Silos effects every part of the organization from impacting the financial plan or budget of the organization due to the improper and lack of communication between the departments, it can shamble your IT staff  as the limited IT resources makes it difficult for developing, managing and analyzing poorly organized data along with their day-to-day work in the organization. Another sector that is immensely affected by the silos is the human resource sector as they have to deal with isolation problems along with poor team management as they hinder the organization from looking inwards. It also slows down your organization by limiting collaboration and communication as well as increase inefficiency in the workforce.

Solving the Problem of Siloed IT in Organizations

Ways to solve the problem of siloeds may include enhancing the communication and collaboration between the employees by identifying the part where the problem began and making adequate changes to fix it and synchronization between all departments in the organization. Another measure includes keeping up the motivation and a positive environment in the workplace, by making sure that the IT is in line with the business goals and aims of the company and the workforce is united in fulfilling the same. It is also important to measure and execute through leadership after the goal has been decided in order to solve the problem of siloeds. Application integration can also be used to tackle the problem of silos that includes enabling applications that are independently designed to work together; it can be done by manually programming it between two or more applications or simply using the middleware software. Another reason for siloeds is the limited skills within different teams and departments, thus, cross departmental relationship should be made within the IT organization. Use of integrated software, such as cloud based applications and integrated platforms as a service are solutions for making different departments work collectively.