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With rapid business expansion often comes data siloing, where one department doesn’t share its data with any of the others. While this may be noticed and fixed quickly in a small business, in a larger company with many sites and a global network, it’s much harder to alleviate.
I’ve read that 73% of company data is never mined with data analytics, with much of that unused data being traced back to the fact that people didn’t realize it was there. Whether they don’t have access to the files or didn’t know where to look, data siloing can ruin data-driven marketing, impair effective decision making, and stagnate the optimization of business processes.
Also see: Best Data Analytics Tools
What is a Data Silo?
When it comes to company data, a silo is when a department hoards its data—intentionally or unintentionally—meaning that other teams don’t have access to it. When this happens accidentally in one or two departments, there isn’t much of a problem. But when every single team in your company suffers from data silos, then you’ll likely see some dramatic consequences.
If one department publishes data, but it is not visible to anyone but their own team members, you effectively create a data silo, with data stacking up but never being distributed across all of your teams.
Why Does Data Transparency Matter?
Internal data sharing, the opposite of data siloing, allows for information to freely pass from department to department within your company. This means that without having to chase data, anyone that needs a certain statistic or data set to do their job more effectively will have access to it.
By forging a business that battles against data silos and works towards a data-conscious company culture, you’ll be able to harness these benefits and more, including:
Data-Driven Decisions
From product design to marketing, data can be used to make more effective decisions while at work. With complete data transparency, everyone will have access to up-to-date data, helping them to make the correct decision based on all of the facts. With companies that suffer from data silos, it’s much more common to see bad decisions made because of the lack of correct data for them to draw upon. These poor decisions can reduce company profits significantly.
Cross-Department Communication
Part of forming an interconnected company culture is allowing data to naturally flow between different areas. Both reducing siloing and inspiring a conversation between departments can lead to a company culture that is much more collaborative, helping to prioritize teamwork while in the office.
Productivity Increases
Without having to actively seek data, ask an employee to share their findings, employees can spend more time actually analyzing the data they come across. With this, they’ll be in a better position to work effectively throughout their day, coming across fewer roadblocks and staying on the path towards digital transformation.
How to Promote a Data-Conscious Company Culture
On the road to dismantling data silos and creating a company culture that understands the value of data and puts it to use, there are a few steps you can take to speed up the process. Considering that the majority of businesses have data silos, it’s always a good idea to check your own processes and ensure everything is as transparent as possible.
Also see: Top Business Intelligence Software
Educate Staff on the Importance of Data Sharing
The majority of the best business practices come back to ensuring your employees understand exactly why they should be doing something. This is no different when promoting data sharing, with the act of highlighting the importance of data within their jobs providing them further reason to make sure they always share – when appropriate – any key findings.
While you can incorporate data consciousness as a core value of your business, many people may overlook this when being onboarded to your company. The best way to ensure they listen is to demonstrate how data arises in their day-to-day job. From pointing out when they’re using another department’s data to signaling when they are using company information to formulate a business strategy, the act of making them notice goes a long way.
Increase Collaboration Across Teams
While data silos can exist for a number of reasons, one that’s often overlooked is a poor level of collaboration and communication across different departments. If there are no conversation pathways for one department to ask another for specific data or their opinions on a project, then it can be difficult to get the conversation started.
Part of creating a data-conscious company is creating one that prioritizes collaboration. By fostering relationships between different departments, through having larger meetings, social events, coffee mornings, and more, you’ll be able to ensure there are common links between all of your departments.
With these pathways open, it becomes much more casual to ask for data, helping to reduce siloing and constantly reminding people that other teams are also relying on the data they produce.
Provide and Integrate Data Infrastructure
No matter how conscious or collaborative your teams are, if they don’t have a common portal to share all of their data to, then they’ll have a hard time sharing anything at all. You should always make sure you have either on-site storage or subscribe to a cloud data warehouse service, giving your employees a location to send their data to.
A data warehouse system is perhaps the most important technical aspect you need to supply for your business. While local storage solutions vary, the expansion of the cloud market has caused the materialization of a range of cloud data warehouse companies.
Equally, be sure to invest in services that integrate data analysis and capturing as part of the daily work of your employees. By having systems and platforms that record data within the CRM and interfaces your employees use on constantly, you can automate much of the data-sharing process.
Creating a Data-Conscious Company Culture
When creating a data-conscious workforce, your first steps should always be to ensure they have the platforms needed to house and process their data. Once these systems are in place, it’ll be important to ensure employees understand the value of the data they create and how they can use data to boost their own decision-making efficiency.
As a result, you’ll easily be able to deconstruct data silos and create a data-conscious company culture.
Also see: Data Mining Techniques
About the Author:
Ralph Tkatchuk of TK DataSec Consultancy