Nearly every business wants to grow: to earn more profits, to hire more workers, to expand with new products or opportunities. However, while business growth provides a host of benefits, it also comes with certain disadvantages and pitfalls. Perhaps the biggest problem that business growth can create is data silos.
What are Data Silos?
Data silos are areas in your business where information is stored without being shared with other areas. For example, your sales team and customer service team may both generate lots of customer data but store them separately without granting access to the other team.
Why does business growth run the risk of creating data silos? As your company grows, the data that each of your departments must deal with grows exponentially. Each department may invest in its own data storage or analysis software without consulting other teams or integrating their solutions. The result is data silos.
The Disadvantages of Data Silos
While data silos may not seem like a huge problem at first glance, they can cause many issues for your business. In the first place, by maintaining separate data repositories and many different software solutions, your company would be wasting resources and the time of your IT department.
Secondly, when each department has access to differing—and perhaps even conflicting! —information, collaboration becomes extremely difficult. For example, if your marketing and sales team don’t communicate about the preferences of a particular lead, you may lose that sale.
Not only does collaboration suffer, but so does executive decision-making. Whose data is most up to date? What data should you base decisions on? Data silos make these questions very hard to answer. Ideally, executives should be able to access reporting and analytics that pull data from every corner of the business. If the data is locked up in silos, this visibility is impossible.
Lastly, data silos can also harm your customers. We’ve all experienced calling a business, only to have to speak to multiple representatives—all of whom ask you to repeat the same information. How frustrating! If your customers have a bad experience like that when interacting with your company, they may take their business elsewhere in the future.
Unifying Your Data
So, given all the problems that data silos can create, how do you prevent them? The best way to prevent data silos is to implement a data management platform that allows you to unify business data across every department in your company. This software should be customized to your unique needs and integrated with any other software that you deem necessary to keep. With modern data management software, your teams
will all be able to collaborate and analyze the same set of accurate, comprehensive data.
Of course, some data will still need to be confidential or protected, especially in certain industries like healthcare. By implementing a data management solution with role-based permissions, you can restrict sensitive data to the appropriate teams while still benefiting from the power of unified data.
Laminin Is About Connection
At Laminin, we’re in the business of connection: even our name comes from a core protein found in our bodies that ties everything together. We believe that a large part of business success is based on connected information, systems, and employees. If your business is growing, let us help you build the best software foundation possible. Contact us today to take advantage of our intelligent information management software and our expert consultants who can optimize your system to help you achieve your business goals.
