Social Architecture
Expertise Silos
In Expertise Silos, knowledge is isolated within individuals or sub-teams, creating communication barriers and making collaboration difficult. This leads to a lack of information sharing and over-reliance on a few people.
Context
Multidisciplinary remote teams, where different specialities (requirements, UX/UI, development, QA, DevOps) rarely interact outside their own workflows.
Problem
Communication between hierarchical levels and across disciplines becomes difficult, and the lack of awareness of what other fronts are doing creates single points of failure.
Consequences
- Operational bottlenecks when the person holding the knowledge is unavailable.
- Rework caused by decisions made without context from other areas.
- Low team resilience to staff changes.
Observed signs
Symptoms
- Difficulty in communicating between hierarchical levels.
- Lack of awareness of the multidisciplinary team.
What to do about it
Mitigation strategies
- Hold regular knowledge-sharing sessions through lightning talks or documentation sprints.
- Practise remote pair programming across disciplines.
- Maintain a centralized knowledge base with role-specific guides.
References
- Tiwana (2004)
- Dingsøyr et al. (2012)
- Desouza & Evaristo (2004)
- Bjørnson & Dingsøyr (2008)
- Herbsleb & Moitra (2001)
Links open a Google Scholar search for the title of the work.