Silos, Innovation, and the Internet

 I remember the burst of enthusiasm surrounding the discovery that the Internet/WWW could be used for business.  Soon it became mandatory for every business to have its own website. Expertise in doing sites was short, so some found a profitable business in creating websites.  I still hear their advertisements from time to time.

Normally I prefer to do business in writing rather than talking, so that meant I was happy with this innovation.  And more and more I found the businesses with whom I wanted to deal had websites.

In the past few years, though, I've tried to deal with businesses who have websites but who don't respond when I send them an email or fill out the contact form on the site.  Sometimes I've reverted to calling them, but usually they lose my business.

What's going on?  I've no proof, not even any data, but my suspicion is it's part of a general parttern:  when an organization has something new to do they:

• may contract it out, or set up a new group to do it.
• they rarely look at how it could impact or improve their existing operations--it's easier to keep doing what is familiar and comfortably within their knowledge and capabilities.
• once the new function (in this case a website) is set up, the initial enthusiasm which evoked the decision, money, and time needed to creat it tends to ebb, especially if the website doesn't show immediate payoffs.
• the end result is the website becomes a dusty relic of some bigshot's pet project  

You perhaps can guess that I think some of this applies to past initiatives by ASCS/FSA/USDA to change the way they operate. 

Indeed, I think it's part of the way our government works.  Part of the life cycle of government initiatives.

[In summary: often the way organizations innovate is by addition, not substitution, which leads to silos.]