Silo busting is a popular concept in many IT circles these days. The idea that you can open up the walls between the various IT teams to open up communications and enable better collaboration is attractive. Yet many organizations have found this easier said than done. Despite the desire from decision makers to open up the lines of communication, the various specialists often have difficulty communicating directly with each other because they simply lack the common dialect that will help them better exchange ideas.
Josh Warcop suggests that IT organizations borrow a role from manufacturing and production floors called “the floater” to address this issue. A floater had enough knowledge of each silos operations and elements to keep the “big machine” running smoothly.
The floater concept is lost among traditional IT silos. We expect everyone in their silo to know what the other silo is doing. The best we can hope for is people in one silo toss and spit out enough information so that things don’t grind to a halt. In full speed production, the teams barely have enough time to tackle their own work, much less help the other silos understand what’s going on.
Read more at: Information Silos – Hire a Floater
