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For many legacy businesses, historical technology investment limits the ability to innovate. In conversations with CIOs, they often refer to the mess with the following endearing terms: fragile, band aid and duct tape. The question is – given the pace of coming waves of digital disruption – can IT clean up the mess fast enough for the business to innovate in time?
How big a problem are silos to creating a foundation for business execution?
In the weekly #CIOchat session, many CIOs said it is a fundamental issue, and without clarity, they’ll have nothing! To be clear, silos are natural, but they need a foundation to support them. If you have integration/API interoperability between silos, then you can solve the coordination problem, but if not, you enable business isolation.
CIOs insist there are silos…and there are silos. The latter includes bad processes, poorly integrated systems and data and conflicting cultures. Today, silos represent barrier conditions to customer delight, supplier enablement and employee engagement. One CIO interestingly said, at this point, that sometimes they work to create some tribalism to help teams build identity before going onto explore things outside their boundaries. The bad boundaries, however, really hurt organization effectiveness. For these reasons, CIOs and their CXOs must identify and prioritize silo produced pain points, barrier conditions and eradicate them accordingly. CIOs, nevertheless, stress that you can't fix all pains at once. For this reason, it is important to prioritize pains according to business impact.
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CIOs suggest that un-tackled silos become a business problem. For this reason, IT organizations need to help businesses bridge gaps, and take advantage of unique attribute differences for the business as a whole. One CIO said that organizational silos, process silos, technology silos and a host of others can each create tangible business problems. However, some are huge, some are in the middle and some are small.
What does the mess cost organizations?
CIOs believe there are many business costs associated with the inability to fix the mess. In fact, their list was much longer than...