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Topic: Big Data

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Silos are okay, even natural part of technology infrastructures

Summary: In our never-ending war against IT silos, the silos are winning. But maybe that's something organizations can live with.

Joe McKendrick

By for Service Oriented |

For years, data integration, application integration and SOA proponents have been waging war against silos. With good reason. Silos result in duplication, create a lot of extra work when attempting to reformulate business processes, and shut off vital information from the rest of the organization.

But there's still a time and place for silos, and sometimes it's better to live with silos than fight with them.

"Data is going to be where it is, in an enterprise," IBM's vice president for big data, Anjul Bhambhri, pointed out in a recent interview with ReadWriteWeb's Scott Fulton. "There may be department-level decisions that were made, department-level applications that are running on top of it. Nobody's going to like some guy coming in saying 'let me bring this all together.'"

Such repositories and applications were built "because they were the best choices at the time for that class of applications," Bhambhri adds. "They can't all be thrown away."

Data federation and information integration is the way to go, she says. "Data is going to reside where it is."

Topics: Big Data, Enterprise Software, IBM, Software

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4 comments
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  • UH

    What's the point of this article?
    davidmpaul
    Reply Vote

    • Perspective

      David: Many people have been railing against silos for years (I have on this blogsite as well). It's the basis of many integration, virtualization or SOA projects. Bhambhri provides somewhat of an against-the-conventional-wisdom argument that maybe some silos are best left alone.
      Joe McKendrick
      Reply Vote

  • Hybrid

    So its a logical extension that data silos ( which I agree with the original post BTW ) will drive the characteristic of hybrid computing infrastructures because the appetite to deal with the deeply router silos is not high and very few CxOs want to have that activity on their watch.

    BrummieRuss.
    paulruss
    Reply Vote

  • Silos are ok - Meet people where they are at...

    Just as Bhambrhri states, ???Data is going to reside where it is???, so too people are going to function and behave as they have and are able. In helping companies customize enterprise project management solutions, we have found that it works best to start with where people are: in terms of skills, habits and know-how. Starting with that given, it is ultimately more effective to customized project management solutions to adapt to the people rather than make people adapt to them. The drive to integrate data ??? break down silos ??? will be ineffective because it will face resistance when something works for people and change is forced. Likewise, effective use of enterprise software solutions starts with ???where??? the people are, then we configure, customize and deploy out from there.

    Sophia Zhou, CEO, EPM Solutions
    @EPMSolutionsUSA
    http://www.epmsolutions.com/
    EPM Solutions
    Reply Vote
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