What Are Data Silos - and Why Are They Hurting Your Business?

The rise of competition, the need to cut down costs, and the desire to seize timely opportunities are driving organizations of any vertical and size to do more with their data, paving the need to address the ever-growing problem of data silos for enterprise-wide information and decision making.

To start, let’s understand what is a data silo. A data silo happens when a collection of data held by one group in an organization is not easily or fully accessible by other groups. Different departments require different information to do their work, and those individual collections of data are stored in separate silos (for example emails, Google Drive). As each department collects and stores its own data for its very own purposes, it creates its own data silo.

A few factors that we can look at:

Cultural: Competition between departments can cause employees to keep data from each other, rather than to work together.

Technological: Applications might not be used, or designed, to cross-reference or add to each other. Besides, one department may simply not have access to a valuable app from another department because it was not purchased for their specific day-to-day tasks.

So, how does this actually become a problem for your organization?

1.   Data Silos limit the view of data

It’s called a data silo for its ability to limit others from seeing what’s inside. They prevent relevant data from being shared, making it harder for tapping into new opportunities that can eventually help reduce operational costs and so on. Each department’s analysis is limited by its own view, making it hard to discover enterprise-level efficiencies.

2.  Data silos threaten data integrity

When a set of data is siloed, the same information is often stored in different databases. This in return creates inconsistencies between departmental data. This becomes more of a problem as the data ages, where it can be less accurate, rendering it to be less useful.

3.  Data silos discourage data democratization

When data is siloed, it disables other groups or departments from evaluating or asking questions about the data, hindering discoveries and making data ready for enterprise decision-making.

Now that we know the problem, how do we break down data silos?

1.  Redefining the culture

It starts with educating employees on data silos, including data integrity and the inability to be more efficient and competitive. Culture change is a great challenge to any organization, and it requires a multitude of efforts to realize change.

2.  Developing ways to centralize data

The best way to bust silos is to pool data into a data warehouse or data lake – central data repositories optimized for better analysis. Data from various sources are consolidated, and access can be easily granted depending on various parameters. At Envyi, we address this with our very own data centralization platform, or also known as a Single Source of Truth (SSoT) platform, Atlas.

At Envyi by InfinitiLab, we constantly advocate for harnessing the power of data to the business user. Our first milestone, meet Atlas. Atlas is designed to be a self-service business intelligence platform that can organize and categorize your data through proprietary data abstraction later. This interface provides a simple yet faster way for the user to search and use data to its full potential.

Click here for more information on Atlas.