Company Silos and Design

One of the criticisms of eGovernment is that it’s silo’d—each agency is an island and there’s little incentive and even less money for doing interagency eGovernment projects. But government isn’t alone in that area—businesses are just as bad.

In this talk on Good Design from User Experience Week, Peter Merholz talks about the silos that exist in companies that create barriers to serving customers. His specific example is how redesigning a bank’s Web site isn’t very effective when customers are so put out at the design of the paper statements they get each month that they’ve given up interacting with the bank.

I’ve long been a believer in an idea called customer interaction hubs, not technology per se, but rather the notion that companies need a more unified view of their interactions with the customer. This isn’t reality in most companies today.

Posted by windley on November 10, 2006 5:09 PM