Douglas Adams obviously knew what makes an IT shop tick. In Life, the Universe, and Everything, he identified the Somebody Else’s Problem (SEP) field, which renders some things not so much invisible as unnoticeable.

IT departments are littered with SEPs because they make the whole tangled mess the average beleaguered IT manager has to deal with more workable. The politically astute sometimes call them “knowledge domains”, or “fields of expertise”, otherwise known as silos.