What is a Siloed Organization?
A siloed organization groups people by specialty — analysis, development, testing, operations — so value must flow across departments to reach a customer, queuing at every border. Each silo optimizes itself; the end-to-end flow, which nobody owns, degrades. Handoffs multiply, knowledge fragments, and "not my department" becomes load-bearing architecture.
The agile counters: cross-functional teams (bring the skills to the work), value-stream thinking (measure the whole flow), and DevOps (fuse the last, worst wall). The APG names silos as the primary organizational impediment to agility — because they are.
Worked example
An insurer's new-product change touches four silos: business analysis writes specs (3 weeks), development builds (4), QA queues it (2 weeks waiting, 1 testing), operations schedules deployment (monthly window). Elapsed: three months; actual work: five weeks. A pilot cross-functional team with deployment rights ships the equivalent change in three weeks — not by working harder, but by deleting the borders the work used to die at.