Fragmented Views of Business Unitsĭata-driven businesses can make million-dollar decisions on a dime. Here are eight problems you’ll solve as you embark on your de-siloing crusade. Rather, shifting silos to standards will better serve any data confidentiality or quarantine needs while improving collaboration and usability for everyone. There’s no logical argument against eliminating data silos. While business and customer confidentiality would of course require a siloing of data, the overall presence of data silos is working against your entire organization. Why are Data Silos Problematic and Costly for Your Business? Departments that are used to independently managing their processes, business goals, and challenges may resist the idea of sharing information. Company Culture and Organizational SilosĮven as an organization streamlines operations and democratizes data, deep-seated company culture can continue to fuel data silos. This can impact reporting accuracy and insights if their data doesn’t align with similar datasets stored elsewhere.
#WHATS A SILO UPDATE#
Rogue End UsersĪ data silo can be as simple as an Excel spreadsheet that users update and maintain on their workstations to fulfill their job tasks. Unless both are properly integrated and support information sharing, they’ll struggle with data silos even on the same team. Mergers and AquisitionsĪs a company grows through mergers and acquisitions, it acquires new systems and data stores. Look below the hood, at the data that’s being created, collected, and organized? Not an ounce of standardization in sight.
When business units are allowed to evaluate and purchase their own tools, it can result in data silos or the deployment of technology that’s incompatible with other systems. Decentralized Technology and Tool Management Relying on these standalone systems without addressing their lack of connectivity with other systems will inevitably result in data silos. And when systems can’t “talk to each other,” it’s impossible to share information across an organization. Legacy systems aren’t known for their flexibility or interoperability with other systems. They’ve become endemic in the age of data sprawl. Though data silos are commonly found in traditional organization structures, they proliferate due to technology, growth, and culture. Today sales reps can have a complete view of the customer along with access to sales support materials through enterprise marketing taxonomy. Such organizational silos were the norm until the explosion of big data, the cloud, and other technology advances fueled data-driven initiatives and collaboration across business lines. To obtain information outside of their “Rolodex” they had to make phone calls or send emails to the relevant departments in a relatively unstructured manner. This meant sales reps didn’t have a complete view of their customers and couldn’t tailor their interactions accordingly.
However, they were standalone systems that didn’t link to the customer data platforms (CDPs) marketing and customer/tech support used. With narrower fields of data creation available, the intersection of usefulness - let alone efficient sharing - between teams rarely arose.įor example, early customer relationship management (CRM) solutions were like online Rolodexes for sales reps to track prospects, customers, and call notes. The root of data silos comes from traditional organizational structures in which each department created, managed, and analyzed its own data.
Data silos, or information silos, are compartmentalized repositories of data that don’t link to the other applications within your IT infrastructure, nor between any team other than the originator.