The Hidden Issue of Siloed Departments and Organic IT Chaos

In our last blog, “The Need for a Digital Workplace on Office 365,” we talked about Organic IT - systems and applications that arose naturally as the business grew. At the time this was necessary from a departmental point of view in order to set into place a way for employees to receive services, follow procedures, submit requests, and ask questions. 
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The downside to this approach of Organic IT is that interdepartmental communication and access to employee-facing business processes, such as time off or expense reporting, is completely separate from one another. This presents a number of problems when employees need to interact with multiple departments and receive services in order to effectively do their job.

From the employee’s perspective, they see chaos because of the inconsistencies resulting from the siloed departments that operate in isolation. Even from a manager’s perspective, requesting approvals or reporting on employee activities within the department is chaotic. Unfortunately employees lose work time when they need to focus on their job, and this causes frustration at all levels. 

In order to alleviate this chaos, automate processes, and improve departmental productivity, business systems were added as the business grows with little regard to the impact across departments. This approach aggravates an already complex situation. 

The result is a chaotic tangle of business applications, communication by endless emails, and documents scattered across servers, or worse yet, in a giant file server. The complexity of accessing internal services is placed on the employee while department managers unknowingly believe the services they are providing are genuinely helpful and clear.  

Organic IT = Chaotic IT Infrastructure

This chaotic IT infrastructure resulting from inconsistencies between multiple departments is what we call Organic IT. Until now this term has been used historically in the 90s and early 00s to define a holistic way to think about the basics of IT infrastructure, hardware, and networks. However, here at SP Marketplace, we take it up a level to relate to software applications and tools that are used every day by employees to operate a business. It is at this level that impacts a business’ productivity and its ability to grow. We define Organic IT as:

At many businesses, this Organic IT rarely goes discussed, which is severely detrimental to the efficiency and effectiveness of business operations. Unfortunately, the executives like CEOs and CTOs are the losers because they aren’t aware of the true impact of the problem. 

This really becomes problematic when the CEO can’t access business analytics across the organization when she needs it most. And sometimes IT managers and staff pawn it off as not their problem because their focus is on what they view as the IT Infrastructure, such as the hardware, networks, email, and others. 

Business executives like the CFO or COO might not understand enough about the technology to see the problem. And department managers often have blinders on beyond their own area, so they don’t see the problem either.

Unfortunately, this Organic IT infrastructure grows like an addiction. Departments continue to add more best-of-breed applications, especially now with cloud-based applications allowing them to do this outside of IT review. As the addiction continues, it gets harder to untangle.

The Impact of Organic IT

Organic IT just doesn’t impact one part of a business. It spans across the entire business, impacting productivity and costs. What’s particularly alarming is that Organic IT can prevent an organization from growing and implementing new business strategies. The major areas that Organic IT impact are:

• Low Employee Productivity and Morale – Employees are your business’ most valuable asset. With Organic IT in place, employees waste time searching for information and documents, experience frustration with disparate, complex systems, and have to wade through inconsistent processes and procedures. The ideal concept of a productive workplace environment involves Office tools like MS Office​
• Rising IT Costs – Each separate application represents significant overhead for IT in the form of maintenance, training, and support. Each requires installation and setup, user security management, storage management, backups, user training, support, and version updates. Additionally, there is the issue of cross-application data integration issues and subscription / annual support administration​
• Limited Management Visibility – With all the complexity of Organic IT, it is nearly impossible to bring operational data together in an executive dashboard. CEOs and other executives view reports generated by the combination of application reporting from all of the functional departments, but are not able to see the big picture​​
• Inability to Grow – Organic IT also can limit a business’ ability to grow, implement new initiatives, and take advantage of new technology. In order for a business to grow, it needs to hire employees. Onboarding new hires is much harder when you have to set up multiple user IDs and train them to be as productive as possible as soon as possible. Supporting new business processes becomes complex, and implementing new technology initiatives like mobile is problematic across so many systems.

As you can see, the impact of Organic IT is deep and spans everyday operations, budgets, and strategy. It might be one of the major reasons that business initiatives fail at the operational level. Yet many businesses would prioritize a new standalone recruiting system over addressing the higher level issue. 

Like an addiction, often the root cause is not understood and addressed, and only the symptoms are seen.  Take onboarding of new employees. Why is this so complex? Part of it is due to increased employee regulations. But, outside of these regulations, much is related to the amount of work necessary to set up and train an employee on systems they will use. If onboarding was not so complex, would it be so time-consuming?  

We will end this blog here. But stay tuned for our next blog release when we go deeper into employee productivity, increasing IT costs, and the hidden costs of an Organic IT infrastructure.

If you missed our previous blog, “Digital Workplace 365 Blog Series: Part 1 – The Need for a Digital Workplace on Office 365,” you can read it here and comment with your own opinions and challenges.

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