What’s the value in bridging business silos?
Due to any number of reasons, companies evolve into organizational silos. Some are structured that way; some evolve due to mergers and acquisitions; and yet others may be due to globalization and the need to cater to different languages, cultures and regulations.
While not all silos are bad many impede the organization’s ability to deliver full value to the customer because of lack of integration. For example, when a customer purchases a product or a service, she does not care that the delivery entailed co-ordination and collaboration among different business areas of the company. Lack of co-ordination and poor integration manifests itself as a lousy customer experience.
While companies are organized hierarchically, the business processes that deliver value to the customer are organized horizontally. This inherent conflict gives rise to operational inefficiencies. The weakest links in delivering customer value and increasing profitability are not the business units, but the touch-points among them. Often such touch-points are not standardized, and have no ownership or accountability.
Strengthening the touch-points provide stronger value chains. Bridging organizational silos accomplish the following goals:
- Enhance customer experience through faster and consistent information sharing across business units.
- Increase operational effectiveness by better managing business processes and reusing common assets.
- Increase profitability through being able to meet customer needs more effectively.
- Reduce expense by removing redundancies and optimizing internal processes.
- Achieve business agility by quickly being able to adapt to fast changing market conditions
By leveraging the tools, techniques and experiences from different disciplines to integrate the organization, you can increase profitability, efficiency, and customer satisfaction.