Why so Silo?

Last year Heath Ledger’s Joker character from the summer blockbuster movie Batman had a very notable line, “Why so Serious?” In a recent frustrating development that had me pulling my hair out, I want to know, “Why so Silo?”

There are many things that are said about government workers, but openness is not one that I see thrown around often. I get so frustrated with all the bureaucracy and closed minded, “That’s not the way we do things” that I see on a daily basis. Recently, I hear about another agency that was having onsite training for the software that I support at my agency. Since the State of Florida does not have money to give to my agency I thought maybe I could go to their training session. Needless to say I after 10 minutes of being on hold I finally got to talk to the someone who knows about the training, but he was not able to answer my questions. This person I talked to was not a supervisor and told that person, his supervisor, I needed to talk to was at lunch. I left my number for the supervisor to call me, but I have not been called back.

There are a couple of things that I have learned from this experience. First, I have no idea who is my counterpart at other state agencies. Because if i did i would have been able to shoot an email to get my questions answered. Second, even if I know the person’s name there is no guarantee that I would be allowed to get assistance from that person.

I have talked in the past about the chairman, at the time, of the State of Florida CIO Council laugh in my face when I suggested that we start a State of Florida IT social network. Every time I think about that memory or have experiences like today, it really ticks me off. You cannot convince me that it is not in the State of Florida’s best interested and pocketbooks to let workers in high technical position to help each other out through social media or just plain old email. Since we have similar architectures and products that need services there has to be a plethora knowledge that could be learned through connecting agency counterparts. I will say that I am not advocating for a consolidation of IT resources, because each agency does has its own unique environment and user base. I am saying that we do share a lot of enterprise applications that could benefit from crowd sourcing other agencies.

This silo behavior is probably on its way out as a new breed of government works that have grown up with web 2.0 technology start entering into higher level positions. Until the time comes when we can start helping each other by sharing information openly, the lack of communication will only hamper innovation and lose tax payers money.