How to bridge silos?
The silos of the business world is pervasive across their respective technology counterparts as well. As functional silos develop, the corresponding business units acquired the best-of-breed technology applications to address problems in their own functional areas, giving little consideration to cross-organizational challenges. This results in increased functional area effectiveness but decreased enterprise effectiveness. However, it’s the cross-organizational processes that span the enterprise, that deliver value to the customer.
Bridging the silos involve bridging the business as well as the technology. Question is how?
Every situation is different, so we can only provide an illustrative example. Here is one approach.
Taking a top-down perspective, we first formulate the Business Strategy. Business strategy will answer the questions of what space the company wants to play it, how it proposes to enhance its competitive advantage, what customers it is catering to, etc.
Business strategy should drive the goals of the organization. These goals may start out at a high level - such as increasing the customer satisfaction, decreasing cost of internal operations, etc.
Then we specify metrics around these goals such as by how much percentage do we want to increase customer satisfaction and how would we measure that?
Business units in turn take these goals and formulate initiatives that help to achieve the goals. To do so, the units use the discipline of Business Architecture. Business Architecture is the blue print of the business and can be used to understand and analyze the different parts of the business - the processes, the roles, the business rules, the interaction among units, etc.
At the same time, the business units leverage the Enterprise Architecture which captures the business and technology relationships at the enterprise level.
Then the discipline of Business Process Management may be brought into play to formulate, optimize and manage the cross-organizational processes. As these processes execute, the different capabilities provided by the different business units are leveraged across the organization. Therefore, the organization will also simultaneously focus on developing the capabilities of its business units.
The business processes will include the specification of individual tasks within them that may be performed by people or computers. The people-machine interactions are captured and modeled.
This in turn provides the information technology (IT) department directions on how to implement reusable and shareable services. Such services become the basis of the mix-and-match Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). In the SOA world, new business processes can be created as the environment changes by simply reconfiguring existing services.
The services that form the basis of the SOA will contain logic that may be externalized as Business Rules if indeed these rules are alterable by the business.
All business requirements are realized through the implementation of applications in programming languages such as Java, .NET, etc. and the data is stored in databases such as Oracle, SYBASE, etc.
As one can see, from the business to the technology, there are multiple levels of integration to make business happen. This is but one way approach the challenge. Often, other disciplines such as change management, project and portfolio management have to be leveraged.
We have the expertise to bring the tools, techniques and experiences from different areas to address the core problem of integrating the organization and busting the silos - for increased profitability, increased efficiency and effectiveness, and increased customer satisfaction.