Sunday, August 21, 2005

Cingular Silos

I've been late coming to cellphones, but I was investigating them on my recent trip. My sister has a Cingular pay-as-you-go plan, and I was asking about moving her to a family plan with me. In doing so I seem to have run into two Cingular "silos". (The information technology world sometimes uses "silos" to designate data bases (and associated processes) that don't interface (see this link). )

The salesperson said that we couldn't move the phone number from the pay-as-you-go plan over to a family plan because the plans were on separate servers and separate towers. That's not a reason; it's a description. (It might reflect a corporate takeover in the past--mergers and takeovers are a good way to accumulate lots of silos. A test of the management of the company is whether they are able to merge silos or decide to do away with one set altogether.) Cingular may have decided it wasn't worthwhile to enable such changes, or they may not have had the time to do so.

He also said that he couldn't sell me a Virginia area code from upstate New York; he was limited to his territory. Sales management may have decided it's simplest to run their organization this way. Certainly my request was probably rare. (But how about parents who buy their kids phones for college--don't they have to deal with different area codes? Or does the question reveal how far out of it I am--do most kids get a cell phone when they graduate from elementary school?) But good organizations are flexible.

These two silos won't keep me from going Cingular, but they're worth remembering when we and Congress criticize the FBI bureaucrats for their own silos.

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