Large organization all have the same issue: sooner or later, they begin to build silo’s. Marketing vs. Sales, Sales vs. R&D, R&D vs. IT,… The problem is that when business units are created, they naturally evolve to… well… a separate unit with their own P&L, strategy, focus, internal politics and so on. This can costs a lot to the company: BU’s battle for their own strategy: A quick time to market for a new service rarely is in line with current IT strategy on development strategy.

In theory, there is always a person above these silo’s (be it the CEO, COO,…) that can mitigate between all these parties. However, it is clear that a CEO, who has more urgent or strategic stuff to take care of, mostly becomes the bottle neck of his own organization if he needs to intervene in every development, idea generation, issue…

So just an idea: why not put one guy/girl on the payroll, that reports directly to the CEO with only one task: be the Ombudsman of the company. She should perfectly know the company strategy and the view of the CEO on the focus of the next year and thus can bring all the business units more aligned without wasting time on formal escalation procedures.