Reconsidering silos

While organisational silos are often viewed as an obstacle to overcome, this paper argues that they are a necessary feature of the workplace environment and should instead be approached in a manner that maximises their potential. This case study describes an approach used by three specialised areas at an academic library — cataloguing and metadata services, digital collections and digital preservation — to retrospectively manage the technical debt incurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. In response to the sudden shift to remote work, library workers developed an action plan to continue an in-process migration with minimal disruption; however, this necessary action significantly exacerbated an already complex file storage system. Although retrospective management of technical debt can be complicated by the management needs of multiple stakeholders, staff members in several areas of specialisation approached the project by identifying needs related to the subcategories of a digital object entity — the intellectual entity, representation entity, file entity and bitstream entity — and developed high-level solutions to meet these needs. This approach exposed three types of silos (context, schemas and processes) and related communication challenges, which can complicate cross-team collaboration. Yet by reconsidering organisational silos as interconnected units of specialisation, staff members successfully applied specialised knowledge, advocated for their management needs and collaborated to resolve the technical debt.