What are data silos and how do you fix them?

Silos in a database will ruin your team’s productivity. So it’s important to ensure every single team member gets access to the correct set of data at the right time. Only then will your business be able to deduce insights from data and act on them decisively. But data silos create a huge problem in this regard.

So, this post covers: what data siloes are, how they affect your business, and how you can avoid them.

What is a data silo?

In short, data silos refer to a set of data collected within an enterprise and held by one department while not being accessible by others.

For example, the finance team may store their data in the form of spreadsheets and the HR team may have their data stored away in a centralized database. Basically, the same organization will have multiple sets of data existing in different formats or organizational layouts which aren’t in favor of unification and collaboration.

The disadvantages of siloed data

It’s estimated that firms suffer losses over $140 billion annually in just the US and UK because of disconnected data silos existing in their business.

Even though silos occur naturally in large organizations over a period of time, it turns into a serious threat to operational excellence across any organization. To make overarching decisions for the entire business, or to run analytical processing with the data flows existing in the organization, it’s important to have a good deal of control over data collected.

When in silos, collaborative efforts between departments can’t progress thereby hindering the growth prospects of the entire business.

• Here are some other drawbacks to data silos:
• It slows your work processes down
• Data silos reduce storage space
• It undermines the credibility and quality of your data

Additionally, data silos can result in the same set of data existing across multiple storage systems within the same organization but having different formatting. The updates or customizations made by one department on their copy may not be accessible by another department even if they both need a single source of truth to operate seamlessly.
For example, the marketing team may be keeping their own version of potential target accounts in one database and running campaigns to generate interest. The sales team usually takes up the next level of customer nurturing and engagement to further drive deal-making.

In effect, sales teams must sequentially access data after marketing teams have run campaigns. But if they exist in data silos, the sales team might approach a customer who was already confirmed by the marketing team as not a proper target. This results in wasted efforts due to data duplication and can even cause damage to reputation as potential customers may feel the organization is disconnected internally.

How do you address data silos?

Now that you’ve learned how bad data silos can be, it’s important to also know how to fix them if they occur within your business. Let us examine three major ways to break down data silos in an organization and unlock the true potential of data-driven decision-making.

1. Leverage integration

The simplest solution to fix data silos is to integrate data by first extracting them from different sources, transforming their structure into a collaborative or workable format, and loading the transformed data into a business system.

This requires a reverse ETL tool like Lytics that enables seamless synchronization with your data warehouse and can facilitate the smooth management of end-to-end data streams.

2. Set a governance model for data collaboration

Even in the world of technology, prevention is better than cure. Rather than eliminating data silos once they are created, the focus of enterprises should be aligned to taking steps that prevent the creation of data silos at any time.

This would require an organization-wide policy and governance framework to come into place to ensure unbiased decision data exchange between systems.

3. Empower a cultural shift

Just as with governance, it’s also important to seek the confidence of all departments before going into an enterprise-wide transformational program like eliminating data silos. Employees from different teams must be made aware of data unification and smooth transactional efficiency owing to silo-free data environments.

Eliminating silos is easy with Lytics

Data silos will continue to pose a disruptive threat to the fluidity that modern enterprises seek to bring about in their consumer sentiments. Businesses must focus on leveraging a powerful reverse ETL platform like Lytics that helps create actionable data that can be processed further. Eliminate data silos today by signing up for a free Lytics demo.