In making key business decisions, companies rely not only on vision, intuition, and experience, but also on data insights.
Big data has never played a more prevalent role in the business world, as organizations invest much of their time and resources into harvesting, managing, and analyzing massive sets of raw data each day. While such qualitative and quantitative information is critical for business direction, it’s important that these insights are handled with transparency, trust, and efficiency among workers.
When constrained to a specific team or department in your organization, collected data can actually serve as a hindrance, rather than aid, to company growth. These isolated data sets are termed as data silos, which hamper business decisions and strategies when left unchecked.
The drawbacks of data silos
Preventing data silos in your business
Removing data silos can help your business operate at maximum productivity and efficiency. Achieving this requires investment in both the proper digital tools and cultivation of new business practices.
- Invest in integration software and all-in-one platforms –
Having information stored across various programs can easily lead to the formation of data silos. Integration software, however, can help you streamline access to this information by connecting your company’s systems and allowing an easy flow of data between them. This process applies to both in-house software and third-party (Software-as-a-Service) business applications.Integrating in-house software may require the skills of an engineering team or enterprise-grade integration software. When using third-party, cloud-based business applications, Integration-Platforms-as-a-Service (iPaaS) is a recommended solution. IPaaS provides an online platform that helps connect disjointed systems, applications, and technologies used on the cloud or on premises.
By investing in integration software, you’ll help workers gain access to the same crucial sets of business information. This, in turn, boosts operational efficiency, productivity, and collaboration.
- Pursue all-in-one data management solutions – Having a platform that unifies all company data and business processes will not only streamline activity and communication between teams, but also prevent data silos by having a single, central space for data storage and management.
Such platforms offer multiple products to address various business operations, such as having programs dedicated to managing sales, marketing, or customer service data. By investing in solutions under the same brand that use the same tools, terms, and ways of integrating data between applications, communication and file sharing are made easier.
- Establish best practices in data management – With millions of new data generated each day, business insights often have an incredibly short lifespan. It thus pays to take time to filter out old data from your management systems, keeping them accurate and up to date.
Having valuable and current insights necessary for business growth is well worth it. Providing your employees with incentives to perform this (or turning it into a team-building activity or competition) can help maintain this practice, ensuring long-term, healthy data management.
Additionally, nurturing a collaborative company culture can build a more trusting, inclusive workplace environment, helping workers feel more comfortable with sharing data with others.
Streamline collaboration and data insights with better technology