The Silo-Investment and De-silo Cycle

When people refer to silos, or stovepipes, they mean it in a critical way. Silos refer to something inefficient because it is insulated, disconnected, uncoordinated. There are organizational silos. There are information silos. There are communication silos.

In some cases, silos successfully fulfill a business case. Successful silos provide promised cost or revenue, but all businesses evolve over time and to evolve with the business, silos that succeeded need to shed their insulated, disconnected, uncoordinated characteristics -- the organization, information, and communications need to be de-siloed.

In other cases silos never achieve their planned business case. In case of failure, the need for integration and coordination may never have been understood or articulated. Like the successful silos adapting to a changing business, the failed silos also need to be de-siloed.
Silos are created and dismantled in cycles driven by business and technology trends. Silos crop up the “Silo-investment” portion of the cycle. They are folded back into the enterprise during the de-silo portion of the cycle.

Portals were envisioned as a way to foster cross organizational communication and many portal initiatives delivered on this promise successfully. The late 1990s and the early years of the 21st century saw much investment in portals. Technologies from Plumtree, Epicentric, and Vignette flourished in the silo-investment phase. The business continues to change and continues to embrace the portal concept, so those portal technologies have begun to be folded back into the enterprise during the de-siloing phase. Portals continue, but they continue in a way that is connected with the rest of the enterprise.

Consider that we are now in the silo-investment phase of web 2.0 social networking technology. There is investment in technologies such as Jive’s Clearspace and Atlassian’s Confluence to realize the value in web 2.0 functionality. This is the silo-investment phase of web 2.0. As before, there will also come a time for de-siloing.