Put this in your pipe

Ben Zimmer wrote on Language Log yesterday about a couple of business cliches, one of which was unfamiliar to SC -- unsiloing -- and another of which has been driving him crazy ever since he was a young intern, stovepiped.

While Dr. Zimmer's writing about pipe metaphors is all correct in SC's experience, at least insofar as his discussion of stovepiping meaning some vertically-oriented structure that inhibits data from getting to where it needs to go, he only indirectly mentions another metaphor which is also commonly used in business (again, going largely by your host's own experience, although examples will follow).

Dr. Zimmer writes:

Organizational silos and stovepipes are almost always discussed in disparaging terms, as hindrances to the efficient management of a company (or a school, or a health-care system, or a presidential administration). So it's not surprising that a term has developed for the breaking down of the silo structure in order to promote "horizontal" cooperation across an organization.

In SC's experience, aside from the negative-polarity "unsiloing" that Dr. Zimmer mentions, which conjures up the metaphor of taking down an existing structure, people selling software to the Pentagon will also talk about "pipelining" as a positive thing. Pipelining has an (informal) technical meaning in software architecture, namely that data gets operated on by a sequence of discrete functional blocks, but your host has also seen people perpetrate sentences of the form:

The BLOVIATE system will replace the existing stovepiped architecture with an integrated, pipelined design.

We are given to understand that the orientation of the metaphorical pipe changes everything. Note also the word "integrated", which is a word of such glowing positivity that it is always* to be used to describe a proposed piece of software, regardless of how nonsensical or inappropriate it is in context (I've been meaning to write about that word for almost as long as this blog has been around).

Some real-life examples follow. While stovepipes and pipelines don't always occur in the same sentence, the usage is meant to imply that pipelines are horizontal, and good, while stovepipes are vertical, and bad (with an exception that proves the rule!):

"The pipeline for defense supply distribution engages multiple distinct “stovepiped” operations: The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) owns and operates the supply management system, the Military Services owns and operate the depot system, the United States Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) manages defense transportation, and the geographic Combatant Command (COCOM) owns the theater distribution system." (link)

"This article will present three different perspectives on the DOD distribution pipeline. The first is an illustration of the current conditions--stovepiped and lacking in overall accountability and ownership. The second suggests a broader, revolutionary vision that embraces the entire distribution process--a true "end-to-end" concept." (link)

"That realization led management to examine pipeline, rather than stovepipe, management concepts." (link)

An academic article titled "From Pipeline to Stovepipe", which, oddly enough, is explicit about the contrast in directionality, but uses "stovepipe" to mean a good thing (link)

If you really feel like spraining your brain with nonstop jargon of this sort, browse this Google search for "+stovepiped +pipeline". Note that many of the hits (that don't refer to actual oil/gas pipelines) are from .gov and .mil domains, or from people who sell to them. This is not a coincidence. It is, however, cliche-ridden thinking, and if SC ever is fortunate enough to run his own company, talking like this might just be a fireable offense.

*Note to Geoff Pullum: As in other cases, this use of "always" does not mean that the set of descriptions of proposed military software and the set of descriptions of proposed military software including the word "integrated" are coextensive. It is a figurative use that means that the word occurs with considerably greater frequency in the described context than it does in other, similar contexts. But don't take it the wrong way -- SC is still a fan.