Sooner or later, you must eliminate the data silos holding back your business

Data Silos are still a problem.

Firstly, they often mean unnecessary duplication and repetitive work that could be centralized and streamlined across an organization. Secondly, by not orchestrating and aligning company data, a lot of valuable insights that could emerge from orchestrating all data will never see the light of day.

This means that siloing is becoming an increasingly acute problem for businesses, creating inefficiencies across their operations and more worryingly, not giving management teams the 360 customer or product views that they need to make critical business decisions.

There are a few factors that trigger this. Today’s data-driven teams maintain and manipulate myriad data sources. This includes external sources, such as Facebook Ads, Salesforce, and ZenDesk, along with internal sources, such as mongoDB, mySQL, and SFTP. Teams that want to scale effectively must avoid siloing these diverse data sources. The more a company scales up, the harder siloed data is to combine, manage, and analyze.

Data integration platforms eliminate data siloing altogether. These platforms aggregate data from any source, internal or external, inside a single repository. This enables teams to unify all data sources in a single infrastructure. Companies can scale up without the bottlenecks of dislocated data sources. There are many data integration processes that can be automated, not only reducing silos within your organization but also improving efficiencies across the board.

Data integration platforms eliminate data siloing altogether.

Many organizations leverage a data migration to a new cloud data warehouse as a stepping stone or opportunity to orchestrate all their data sources, align the insights across teams, and ultimately centralize the way they manage data. In addition to the obvious efficiencies in terms of saving time and money, ending data silos means taking data processes to the next level. Once all data points are aligned, you can finally get the full picture of your operational performance. Even though we often take charts and graphs as gospel, these insights are often incomplete and they might be hiding some truth bombs you should be aware of.

In addition, as companies move towards machine learning algorithms and dip their toes into AI, it is essential for them to unify and align all their data first. These emerging technologies rely on as many data points and data sources as possible to be able to generate accurate insights, predictions, or even take automatic action through AI.

Sooner or later, all your data will have to be in sync and align so it can become the single source of truth across your organization.

It is normal to have data silos. After all, they probably emerged organically as different teams or employees looked for ways to improve their data collection processes. However, having a data overhaul in which processes are streamlined is a must. Sooner or later, all your data will have to be in sync and align so it can become the single source of truth across your organization. In addition, it will give you an opportunity to develop new KPIs, that accurately depict your performance and help teams make the best decisions with the most comprehensive insights.