Tearing down silos.

• Author: Hodges, Silvia
• Position: About This Issue

How much time do you spend with your colleagues in HR or finance? When did you last read a book about architecture or something completely unrelated to marketing? If you are like me, you'd like to think of yourself as an open-minded person, always open to take in ideas, be inspired and ready to collaborate. However, many of us wear blinders when it comes to work. We define ourselves as marketers, and if we pick up a business book, most likely, it is a marketing book. This is entirely human, and most law firms--like other organizations--are this way, too. It's called the "silo syndrome," and it means that there are barriers among the many parts of an organization. Each department or function interacts primarily within its own "silo" rather than with other groups across the firm. This breeds insular thinking, redundancy, power struggles, lack of cooperation, and loss of productivity--in brief, less than optimal decision making. The failure of people and systems to interact causes data to become trapped and unavailable to decision makers outside the silo.

The articles in this issue of Strategies show why we need to tear down the silos. The authors, Paul Lippe, Samina Gheorghe, Michael Roch, Scott Westfahl, Kris MacAuslan and Diane Costigan, bring examples of how marketing can and should interact, overlap and collaborate with other management functions such as information technology, finance and human resources to...