When I began my career, the world was made of silos. There was a silo for engineering; another for production; more silos still for quality, customer support and training. Within those silos, were worlds unto themselves: empires, really. Products moved through each silo of a company. People stayed in each one, looking over the wall at the others.
The game was to build your silo as much as possible. Make it tall, wide. Dominate the others. Bring the best people in the bottom of your silo. Teach and groom them until they rise to the top -- or at least as high as you want them to go.
"Cross-functional" and "Matrixed" became buzzwords as we all began to realize that we actually had to work together. We had to share information and responsibility for outcomes. Still, though, the organizational structure of silos remained. We had a person from each silo involved, that was all. There was still "us" and "they". But there was a new "ours". Something we owned together.
Since that time, we've experienced an acceleration of expectations. Acceleration of flow. Acceleration of communication. Acceleration of chaos. In a world of new product releases 3 times a year, a 5 year product plan seems ludicrous. Developing skills and knowledge within a "silo" to focus on some non-immediate need is suicidal, when competing against companies possessing the facility to obtain the right knowledge now to do the job.
So the word is convergence, driven by co-evolution. Engineering co-evolving and increasingly converges with production with quality (built in) with knowledge flows (not training) and with support functions built in. More than ever, lines between silos are smudged. And if you are not converging, you are dying at the hands of someone who has. Why? Because to converge functions is to collaborate intensively -- to provide an environment of coevolution. It is building a business that is designed to converge. And that is what business collaboration is: the ability to converge, arbitrarily, strategically, real-time to gain greater advantage -- evolve fast and survive.
