Solving the Problem of Siloed IT in Organizations

Business leaders should engage directly with the IT team and ask the right questions to breakdown the barriers and drive transformations.

Keeping the IT team siloed can wreak havoc on strategic priorities and affect the entire organization.

• Software engineers are busy polishing the code, fixing bugs
• IT team head is buy defending the team creating the walled garden from outside interferences
• Customer-facing staff are facing angry uses demanding bug fixes and new features
• Business leaders feel like outsiders in technology discussion, and do not intervene.

The software engineers are unaware of the problems around them due to delayed rollouts and lack of communication. On the other side, the marketing, the business development team may feel too intimidated to act because of a lack of technical expertise. 

Even if the project fails, the technical team gets reassigned or may be outsourced. We first need to understand how the IT teams became so independent and opaque to the organization's requirements.

How did the walled garden come up in the first place?

In the past decade, a growing understanding of technology to business has led to a surge in the use of digital, agile, lean, DevOps to speed up software development. The walled gardens are a result of technology leaders act in good faith to create a process for software development. The IT head attempts to create an environment in which the unresolved conflicts in the organizational alignment are excluded. 

The problem is a symptom of a larger issue left unaddressed. This is one of the most important factors leading to digital transformation failure. 

Typically, everyone has good intentions and work hard at achieving them - software engineers to produce high-quality software, non-technical members defer to the technical team and hope everything will work out well in the end, IT team head insulating the software engineers from the chaos outside. 

Conversations replace the walls

Conversations would prove useful in breaking out of the walled garden. By implementing the four Rs' - recording, reflecting, revising, and role-playing in their conversations participants learn to be transparent, and curious. It begins to generate trust and build culture.

After improving the conversations and building trust, the main barrier to delivery would be safety norms. This may lead to extreme caution and overdesign of solutions. Once they have better communications to build coherence and sort out their concerns, they validate the result. When they find that there was significantly more flexibility in the requirements, then they set realistic parameters for quality, and subsequently, software changes if required were implemented quickly at periodic intervals. 

It is important to have conversations, however difficult they are, to build trust and reduce fear to help organizations to emerge from their siloed environments. Analyzing and improving conversations helps in three key areas - defining a clear purpose, learning to commit effectively, creating two-way accountability. 

Collaboration is simpler and satisfying. It also increases the revenue and market share as all parties discover previously hidden options and solutions. 

Solving the Problem of Siloed IT in Organizations

Douglas Squirrel and JeÚrey Fredrick • MIT SMR July 07, 2020