Print Column: Why Are City Governments, Park Boards and School Boards Separate?
MINOT, N.D. — Over the years I’ve had several conversations with Gov. Doug Burgum talking about a phenomena in government he describes as “siloing.”
This is the practice of treating each segment of government as a sort of sovereign entity which doesn’t share much of anything else with other government entities.
Burgum sees this as wasteful, and at the state level he’s sought to end it.
An example of this was last year’s move of websites for the state’s agencies and departments onto one hosting platform.
The public servants in charge of these entities still have some autonomy to choose designs and functionality, but instead of a number of different systems on the back end of these websites there is now one.
Burgum broke down the silos, and made things more efficient.
What if we applied that sort of thinking to local government?
