Mitigating the worst impacts of silos.

• Author: Kavanagh, Shayne
• Position: The Bookshelf - The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers - Book review

The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers

Gillian Tett Simon and Schuster

2015, 304 pages, $28

Many local government managers have long appreciated the potential benefits of breaking down silos--the barriers that exist between specialized functions--within government. However, for just as long (and usually successfully), silos have resisted integration. There is a good reason why silos persist: Different tribes of government workers, such as police, fire, building inspectors, and even public finance, benefit from having distinc languages, cultures, and work processes, which help organize the complexity of highly specialized professional endeavors. Anthropologist Gillian Tett writes about ways in which all organizations, public and private, bridge these internal functional divides.

CURBING FIRE FATALITIES IN NEW YORK

The Silo Effect begins with a story from the City of New York municipal government. In the decade leading up to 2011, New York City had experienced thousands of house fires each year, resulting in approximately 85 fatalities annually. Despite the number of building inspectors the city employed--more than 200 --finding hazardous buildings before a fire occurred was very difficult. Just 13 percent of inspections revealed unsafe conditions, even when the inspections were prompted by complaints about potential fire hazards.

The mayor's office formed a team to improve this state of affairs. They started by working closely with frontline staff and examining data sets from departments including police, fire, building, water, and housing. Looking across these departments, they found some important predictors of dangerous buildings:

* Built before 1938, when building codes were made more stringent.

* Located in poor neighborhoods.

* Owners were delinquent on their mortgages.

* Buildings have generated complaints about other issues relating to poor upkeep, like vermin.

Putting together these factors and their respective data sets from across departments, the city was able to generate a list of buildings for inspectors to target. Though the inspectors were initially unsure about using this information, encouragement from the mayor's office convinced them to do so--and they found violations 70 percent of the time, a four-fold improvement over just using the complaints lodged with their department. Using this cross-departmental technique, the mayor's office went on to realize improvements in dealing...