5 ms·

I wish you were wrong. Silos are everywhere -- ugly and unavoidable bottlenecks. Nobody has a plan to fix that culture though because it works only just good en

• devonkim 10y ago
  I personally don't see anything "wrong" with silos - they are the partitions of the distributed systems of human society and are going to emerge anyway partially due to Dunbar's number in a "flat" organization. The issue I see is that managers are unwilling or very slow to understand new lines of division of labor ("What do you mean that sysadmins should also be developers? Why would we want that?" - direct quote from a customer) because it doesn't correspond to what their information systems management textbooks from 2002 told them how IT labor is divided. Then comes issues of training managers and telling people why this re-org is so much better than the last 10. This is why the "devops" movement in enterprise is cheap business consulting labor to me - it results in a re-org in most places, and that's the equivalent of developers showing up at a new shop and suggesting refactors as a newbie. Furthermore, most IT managers have such poor data from the organizations they run that the only things they can track are money spent, not money saved and such. And showing that a CIO doesn't know wtf his company gets you kicked out of meetings permanently in most (typically dysfunctional) organizational cultures.