How have organizations evolved into horizontal silos over the years? What impact does this have on information sharing?

What will be an ideal response?

The idea of breaking up the business into horizontal silos goes back to the early 1900s. This was when a researcher first divided up a business into five basic areas; planning, organizing, coordinating, commanding and controlling. This later evolved into the functional areas or departments that we use today; i.e. Accounting, HR, Marketing, Finance, and Management. This way tasks could be broken down into smaller, more manageable tasks and assigned to specific people who would be held responsible for them. However, this focus on smaller tasks and individuals led to the development of specific information systems to support them. These systems were not designed with sharing in mind since the organization as a whole was not as concerned with this. So sharing information was especially difficult since there was little support for the "process view" of the organization.