Information Silo - Silo Effect

Silo Effect

As of 2010 the phrase "silo effect", popular in the business and organizational communities, refers to a lack of communication and common goals between departments in an organization. It is the opposite of systems thinking in an organization. The silo effect gets its name from the farm storage silo; each silo is designated for one specific grain.

A lack of communication causes departmental thinking to lack ideas from other departments. A notable example of the silo effect in the real world is the beer distribution game, whose goal is to meet customer demand for cases of beer, through a multi-stage supply chain with minimal expenditure on back orders and inventory. Communication is against the rules so feelings of confusion and disappointment are common.

Another, slightly more academic, suggestion as to the term silo effect focuses on the gradual draining of the entire silo's grain from a remarkably small opening in the bottom. The homogeneous state of the entire volume of grain makes it highly susceptible to small changes as they occur further and further down. This is because gravity, although apparently "unimportant" to a fully contained silo, suddenly shows itself to be an underlying force binding every single grain—something which becomes apparent when an "anomaly" occurs at the bottom. Moreover, the nature of grain makes it an excellent example of a "poorly connected" substance, prone to cascades of extreme collapse when they occur in favor of the systems overriding unified force. In this case, gravity. If the grain were more like a soapy foam, or even a gel, such a terrible collapse would be intrinsically averted, by means of the distributed multidirectional stability of its parts.