Data Silos
Lack of integration, collaboration, ineffective use of resources and no single source of truth
Do you have data silos?
Data silos are isolated pockets of information that form part of business processes but are isolated from the rest of the organization. Typically the data is mastered in a different way and lacks the necessary quality controls to enable it to join up with other data structures, which would otherwise allow the business to gain insight.
Lack of timely and accurate information
Due to the lack of integration, business leaders often miss out on crucial information necessary to make more robust and evidence-based business decisions. For example, if your competitors changed their pricing strategy and this was eroding market share, knowing this information before year-end results would enable strategic planners to recommend the necessary corrective action to mitigate the impact and maintain competitive advantage.
Data inconsistencies and lack of effectiveness
Without proper integration, there would also be inconsistencies in core datasets with other parts of the organization. For example, your manufacturing department may produce a set of products for the cycle. But if your marketing department did not have the complete list of products that the manufacturing department was making, and their data had products that had been discontinued; this would lead to an ineffective marketing campaign.
Due to the inability to work against a single source of truth, departments would find it challenging to work with each other. In addition, processes that span across departments would not work effectively, increasing the tendency for departments to work in isolation.
Increased workload and business expenses
There is typically an associated overhead when departments maintain their own datasets. Datasets are routinely re-created and transformed into something which is locally usable. This process must be repeated regularly, sometimes daily. When this happens in a similar vein across departments, there is significant duplication of effort.