- 6 mins
Let's imagine an everyday situation. It is Sunday morning and you would like to have your favorite food, so you get to the kitchen and start cooking. After a few minutes, you realize that you do not have all the ingredients at home and now you have to drive to the supermarket with the risk of not finding what you need.
Now your fancy dinner is in danger since you are not sure if you will be able to cook it as usual, you're hungry and time is short. Your goal seems unreachable.
Something similar happens with data in companies when stakeholders need to use it for analysis. The real problem is that when data is fragmented or distributed in silos, there is the possibility of not finding unified, orderly, and accessible information. These types of problems affect decisions, as well as reports and research for business strategies. When the information has the aforementioned characteristics, it is known as Data Silos, let's define this concept.
What are Data Silos?
Data Silos are separated places where an organization’s information is processed to carry out internal and external workloads, while they also store data. In the past, these functions weren't an issue for companies since this was their intended use. However, the current trouble is that isn't linked, which can be translated into a pain point in the competitive world we live in.
As a result, disconnected data (or multiple sources) hinders the company's development as employees or departments don't have access to the information they need to meet established objectives. For example: for getting a 360 view of the behavioral client, maybe the sales, marketing, and retail areas have different information about a unique person, which implies more work and more time are invested than necessary.
On the other hand, Silos are not on their own. There is another issue called Data Fragmentation, which is when information is in different places, consequently, the apartments are separated, and the data too. Sometimes there is a host who has limited access to information which ultimately impacts workflows and business strategies.
How to identify and eliminate Data Silos risks?
Analyzing and detecting the challenges of Data Silos is an important step for many organizations. In this sense, according to Xtremepush, there are several signals to identify the issues regarding silos and fragmentation. Do you recognize any of them?
• Wasted resources: when information is distributed in various sources or isolated from the people who need it, the information must be manually located, which implies a waste of time in the search, correction, and recheck.
• Inaccurate information: sales and marketing departments gather data every day from customers or prospects, and if they encounter duplicates, incomplete or incorrect information, the solution is to consolidate the database.
• Failed strategies: historical and daily collected data are the starting line in business strategies. If this information is divided into multiple sources, the final results could put at risk the next company initiatives and delay a real digital transformation.
• Limited scalability: if your operation, sales, and processes grow, the volume of data grows too. Consequently, you could lose control of your information and thus limit the scalability of your current or future projects.
• Broken funnels: scattered data is similar to a lack of 360 vision of the result that your company produces. On one hand, you could have your clients’ profiles, and on the other, their behavior towards your brand or service. Why not have everything together to make decisions? Remember that missing information also impacts the ROI.
Now you may be asking yourself how it is possible to solve these problems or get rid of Data Silos. Fortunately, today’s technology allows companies to take control of their information and use it to improve development and face a competitive business environment.
As a result, the data silo is an information system that only one area has access to, meaning this is an obstacle to sharing data with other departments within the organization. Therefore, fragmented information must be mitigated. In order to achieve this, you can take some steps to improve the efficiency of your company.
How to break Data Silos?
Use optimized tech tools
Today’s technology offers effective solutions to manage all the daily-generated data, so why not implement one of them? The best decision is an ETL Solution since it will help you transform your internal data architecture and do your work through one information system.
Another element that you must consider when we talk about data strategies is governance, an initiative that boosts your business plans and leads to accomplishing rules and politics.
Adopt a centralized data system
An excellent data strategy is always linked with data warehousing performance, a storage system whose objective is to unify data and integrate information. The architecture of this makes collaboration easier among departments and staff members thanks to this way of work which facilitates the use of data to get better insights.
Boost a collaboration culture
Teamwork is essential in any organization, but when this practice implies data management, collaboration becomes more important. This is why one area can affect the other and create a domino effect where errors, failures, and disparities waste resources and time. This is the reason why you need to invite your team to be transparent with information.
In addition, all your team members should be flexible to change. Remind them that this is for the benefit of the whole company.
Use case: Connection of data in one source
In addition to creating data solutions according to your needs, in Arkon Data we guide companies with the objective of giving a complete service by solving issues that can be affecting the development of your business.
Recently, one of the most important companies in technology products contacted us since they were faced with a disparity of information between their data and the one provided by their customers. As a result, the lack of alignment affected the payment process. Despite the issue being solved, this underwent for a long time, still creating conflicts.
At this point, we discovered a way to tackle this issue. We stored the company and clients' information in one place. The reason? All this time they had been working with fragmented information.
A solution like the one we offer at Arkon Data gives you the benefit of connecting your information from different sources and thus working on a single repository, which will give you greater performance in processes and operations, from internal to those with customers and suppliers.
Through proper monitoring, with Arkon Data you can break down Data Silos and link your information so that it becomes the single axis of the company.
Don't let your information get lost between silos or different sources! We help you in the unification of data.
