When Each Department Has Its Own Version of the Truth

# ITIL

# Teamwork

# Thought Leadership

From conflicting KPIs to real alignment: Breaking down the silos holding your teams back.

September 17, 2026

Yurguen Penaranda Thomas

When Each Department Has Its Own Version of the Truth

Introduction: The Meeting Where Everyone Was Right

During a management meeting, the organization's director requests the monthly update of a KPI from the Finance department. When the Finance Manager presents the figure, the Operations Manager indicates that their department also calculated the KPI but obtained a different result. The IT Manager and the Risk Manager state that they also have different results for the same KPI.

A single KPI and four possible results. Instead of the meeting focusing on "What decision should we make based on the KPI result?", it ends up focusing on "What is the correct KPI result?"

In reality, none of the results may be incorrect. All four calculations may have used valid criteria and reliable sources of information. However, the inconsistency may stem from the fact that the criteria and data source that should be used to calculate the indicator have not been officially defined. In addition, it is not clear which area is responsible for its calculation, creating duplication of functions, as four teams are dedicating time and resources to calculating the same metric.

The Origin of Multiple Versions of Reality

The situation described above usually occurs because the organization has developed a siloed way of working. This means that, although each area may correctly perform the tasks related to its specialization, its focus is limited to what is happening within its own department, resulting in poor communication and coordination with other teams. This siloed culture may result from a set of practices such as the following:

Departmental objectives: Each work group establishes its local objectives without a joint definition of objectives across all areas in order to identify synergies or opportunities for collaboration in achieving them. This may cause similar objectives to exist across multiple departments, leading to duplication of functions or, on the other hand, causing local objectives in one department to conflict with the objectives of another department.

Local indicators: Related to the previous point, the creation of departmental objectives disconnected from other areas also gives rise to indicators used to measure the achievement of those objectives. As in the example presented at the beginning of this article, this disconnect in objectives can lead multiple teams to calculate the same objective. If each department calculates it using different criteria, confusion can arise regarding the official value of the metric. On the other hand, duplication of calculations results in multiple people spending time performing the same task, namely calculating the same measurement.

Processes designed by department: Each team develops different processes to address similar management activities. As a consequence, when a request or activity must move from one department to another, confusion may arise regarding which process should be followed, leading to delays or errors in handling the request.

Independent tools: When departments use different processes, they may also implement management tools exclusively for their own use. This situation creates confusion regarding which tool should be used to submit each type of request. Additionally, operating costs related to implementation, licensing, and maintenance are duplicated.

Lack of end-to-end visibility: All of these elements contribute to a culture where there is no shared understanding of the end-to-end value stream. Among other consequences, this makes it difficult to identify opportunities for improvement related to error reduction or resource optimization.

The Hidden Cost of Silos

Promoting a siloed way of working can create negative consequences for the organization’s operations, such as the following.

Slower Decisions

When departments work in isolation, the information required for decision-making is distributed across multiple areas. As a result, before a decision can be made, time must first be spent collecting, consolidating, validating, and analyzing data.

Consequently, the decision-making process requires more time, and therefore becomes more expensive, because it is also necessary to involve all the individuals who have detailed knowledge of the data involved in the analysis. Silos do not only fragment information; they also slow down decision-making.

Unproductive Meetings

Meetings involving members from multiple areas stop focusing on decision-making and identifying improvement opportunities and instead focus on resolving conflicts between teams and determining which interpretation is correct. Meetings end up concentrating on which department follows the correct process, which tool should be considered the organizational standard, which group has the correct KPI value, and which group calculated it correctly.

When there is no shared view of reality, meetings become spaces for debating information rather than discussing solutions.

Duplication of Effort and Increased Costs

When each area has independent processes, duplication of functions is highly likely. This contributes to increased operating costs because multiple people from different organizational units perform the same functions.

On the other hand, having management tools dedicated to each department also increases costs. This is because implementation, licensing, maintenance, and improvement costs are duplicated for each tool, instead of using a single management tool across all areas, which would significantly reduce costs.

Conflicts Between Areas

Organizational fragmentation and poor collaboration between departments create distrust between areas, which can lead to conflict.

When teams have conflicting objectives, the members of each group focus specifically on achieving their own objectives without considering how this may affect members of other departments.

Likewise, when KPIs calculated by different areas produce inconsistent results, employees begin to question the quality of data supplied by other departments, when the real root cause of the inconsistency is that the official method for calculating the indicator and the role responsible for doing so have not been defined.

In addition, when different areas use specific processes and tools to perform the same types of tasks, friction arises regarding which process should be followed or which tool should be used to handle requests, since members of each department consider their own process and tool to be the most appropriate.

Trust is not lost due to a lack of information, but when different areas present incompatible versions of the same reality.

Operational Delays

Because of this disconnect between departments, the pressure to achieve departmental objectives, and the existence of duplicated processes and tools, operational delays may occur. This is because when a request involves interaction between multiple areas, it is unclear which process should be followed, whether it should follow the process of one area or that of another team. Furthermore, it is not clear which management tool should be used to handle the request.

On the other hand, having multiple processes and tools increases the learning curve for employees. They must learn multiple activity flows, operate multiple tools, and understand in which situations each process and tool should be used. These conditions increase the likelihood of delays and errors in handling requests.

Poor Customer Experience

All of the situations described above do not only affect internal operations. They can also negatively affect the customer experience.

This occurs because customers may notice contradictions when their requests move through different areas, receive inconsistent information, or experience variations in perceived service quality depending on the service channel.

In addition to delays in service delivery, poor communication and collaboration between teams may require customers to explain their requirements multiple times as the request moves from department to department. Costs generated by duplicated functions and tools ultimately contribute to a higher cost of service. Furthermore, the lack of collaboration may result in errors in the service delivered to the customer.

How Can Organizational Fragmentation Be Measured?

The following measurements can help identify whether an organization exhibits a siloed working culture.

Multiple Tools for the Same Function

If several departments use different technological tools to manage similar activities, it is a sign of poor integration. Examples include ticket management tools, document repositories, and data sources used for indicator generation.

Number of Handovers Between Areas

The more departments involved in a process, the more important coordination between areas, process standardization, and tool consolidation become. Each handover represents an opportunity for delays, errors, or information loss.

Multiple Reports for the Same Topic

If several areas develop different reports that calculate the same indicators, this is a strong sign of fragmentation. On one hand, it creates duplication of functions because multiple people are dedicating time to the same task. On the other hand, it is highly likely that metric results will differ because slightly different calculation methods are being used.

Failure to Meet Service Request or Incident SLOs Due to Lack of Coordination

In many cases, delays in resolving requests are not caused by the complexity of the issue itself, but rather by the dependency on another team to perform an action related to the request, such as approval, investigation, review, or execution. When organizational fragmentation exists between departments, teams often do not demonstrate the same level of commitment to collaborating on requests that require joint effort. The amount of time work remains waiting is often a more useful indicator than the actual execution time.

What ITIL Is Really Trying to Promote

One of the benefits of integrating the ITIL framework into organizational operations is the reduction of isolated ways of working and the promotion of collaboration and communication. The following ITIL concepts directly support this collaborative culture.

ITIL Guiding Principles

The ITIL Guiding Principles directly promote a culture of collaboration, particularly the following two principles:

Think and work holistically: This principle recognizes that services are not the result of a single isolated area, but rather the outcome of multiple teams working together in a coordinated manner.

Collaborate and promote visibility: This principle encourages collaboration between areas and transparency of information. When visibility is shared, misunderstandings are reduced, decisions improve, and conflicts decrease.

The ITIL Service Value Chain and Value Streams

The Service Value Chain is the central component of the ITIL Value System. It consists of a set of general activities performed by the organization to manage the lifecycle of digital products and services and to enable value for service consumers.

In day-to-day operations, organizations perform combinations of lifecycle management activities in order to enable or restore value for service consumers and other stakeholders. These combinations form the organization’s value streams.

The Service Value Chain provides a model for visualizing how different activities work together to transform demand into value.

Under this approach, the emphasis is not on optimizing the activities of each department independently, but rather on understanding how all activities contribute to service delivery. This makes it possible to identify dependencies, coordinate efforts, and ensure that individual activities remain aligned with the organization’s overall objectives.

Complementing this perspective, Value Streams represent the complete journey followed by a request, requirement, or need from its origin to the delivery of the expected outcome. This perspective facilitates understanding of how different areas participate throughout the process and how their activities connect to produce value.

ITIL promotes understanding and managing services from this integrated perspective, encouraging collaboration among the different capabilities involved in service delivery.

Service Journey

The Service Journey promotes understanding the complete experience that a consumer has when interacting with the organization.

From this perspective, attention is not focused solely on the internal activities of each department, but rather on how the customer perceives the service across all interactions with the organization.

This approach helps identify opportunities to improve coordination between teams, simplify interactions, and deliver a more consistent customer experience.

ITIL recognizes that customers perceive the service as a single experience. Therefore, it promotes coordinated organizational efforts to deliver a consistent experience throughout the entire service journey.

The Four Dimensions of Service Management

The Four Dimensions of Service Management provide a balanced perspective for designing, managing, and improving services.

These dimensions are:

Organizations and People

Information and Technology

Partners and Suppliers

Value Streams and Processes

ITIL recommends considering all four dimensions simultaneously when designing or improving services because outcomes depend on the interaction among all of them, rather than on the performance of a single area.

This approach promotes a shared understanding of how people, processes, technology, information, and suppliers collectively contribute to value creation. By analyzing services from multiple perspectives, organizations can strengthen collaboration, improve coordination, and make decisions that benefit the service as a whole.

Conclusion

Modern organizations need specialized areas capable of developing specific knowledge and capabilities. Specialization makes it possible to increase efficiency, strengthen technical expertise, and improve the quality of decisions within each discipline.

However, specialization stops adding value when it becomes isolation. When each area defines its own objectives, indicators, processes, and tools without a shared organizational vision, duplication of effort, conflicts, delays, and inconsistencies emerge that make value creation more difficult.

A mature organization is not characterized by each department independently achieving its own objectives. It is characterized by all areas sharing a common understanding of reality, collaborating effectively, and working in a coordinated manner to achieve results that benefit the organization as a whole.

When each area has its own version of the truth, the organization ends up investing more time reconciling differences than solving problems. True organizational maturity does not consist of optimizing silos, but of connecting people, processes, information, and technology to generate value together

Where conversation, connection, and real-world practices come together.