On silos, clouds and lakes: a critical history of data storage ecologies

Keywords: information silos, data lakes, cloud technologies, supply chains, computational regimes, datafication, information organization
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 5

Abstract

In 1988, Goodyear tire and Rubber Company employee Phil S. Ensor popularized the term functional silo syndrome to describe rigidly defined "vertical" organizational structure or communication channel, suggesting a similarity between vertical grain silos and organizational structures and mentalities. Since then, "information silos" have been used to express inhibiting structures for innovation and communication. Data-driven companies such as Palantir and AWS have emerged as new key actors in the destruction of vertical silos, promising potential buyers to integrate data across supply chains and organizational structures. Cloud economies and data-driven societies have thus given rise to new political ecologies of storage, expressed through new horizontal imaginaries of data clouds and data lakes. These horizontal storage forms operate as active, continual and networked processes of data retrieval, reuse, and analysis, inverting older vertical logics of digital inventories as and reconfiguring the coordination between government, market, and society in the process. In this work, we conceptualize silos, clouds and lakes as a types of informational infrastructure, and deploy genealogy as method to examine the societal shift from centralized to networked technologies. Drawing on feminist container technology theory, and critical theories on data and algorithms this paper offers a close reading of the spatial politics of the computational regimes of verticality and horizontality within the Danish public sector. It focuses on how the shift from silos to lakes and clouds transform power relations and governance structures with significant ethico-political implications.