Shifting From Organizational Siloes to Fully Integrated Data Systems

How integrated business management systems can help you break down organizational siloes and turn dark data into actionable insights.

In an age of rapid digital innovation, companies have unprecedented opportunities to collect data from a constantly increasing range of sources. Some have been doing it for years and, as a consequence, have potentially valuable data stored across legacy systems that lack the ability to interface seamlessly with modern, cloud-based apps and other platforms.

The challenge lies in turning this data into actionable insight. In fact, according to research by Seagate, over two-thirds of all business data goes unleveraged. The vast majority of this data is so-called dark data, which is one of the biggest untapped resources in many organizations. Large and established companies have it even harder than most since many are still using legacy systems and archives of data spanning years or even decades.

These disparate computing environments end up being barriers to information-sharing and, consequently, innovation. Dark data, which is largely unstructured and unmonitored, may also pose additional security and compliance risks. Moreover, organizational resilience can end up being compromised due to the inability of different teams to readily share critical knowledge.

The imperative to act has never been more urgent. Getting a handle on dark data is essential for a multitude of reasons, and it should be considered a key part of information governance. By knowing where this data lives and what it means, companies can better protect their most valuable information assets and turn them into insights that drive smarter decision-making.

How Does Dark Data Result in Organizational Siloes?

Organizational siloes are a common problem in larger organizations and those that have been around for a long time. However, they can also afflict smaller companies, including startups, due to the constantly changing nature of today’s technology systems and the customer expectations they drive. 

Small businesses also have the added challenges of limited budgets and workforces, which make it harder to keep pace with rapid technological advancement. In other words, dark data is a problem, as well as an opportunity, across the board.

While a lack of leadership direction is often a factor, even leaders who are true champions of innovation can have a hard time keeping up. After all, the amount of data generated by today’s companies is doubling every couple of years on average, and it is coming in from more and more different and disparate sources. 

These include cloud-hosted apps, mobile devices, IoT devices, and legacy systems, just to name a few. When these different data systems fail to work together, clear and timely communication becomes much harder, if not impossible.

Dark data can either be a cause or result of organizational siloes. Technological complexity is a common cause for data existing in siloes that do not interface well with one another. On the other hand, if different teams are not willing to collaborate and share information readily, dark data is the inevitable result. 

In this case, a lack of centralized oversight results in departments or branches doing their own thing and thus drifting further apart. As such, addressing the issue of dark data requires a top-down approach with a focus on unifying people, processes, and technology.

To give an example, consider how the modern customer experience is inextricably intertwined across sales, marketing, and support. Traditionally, these three core business functions took the form of separate departments, occasionally collaborating by passing customers between each one as necessary. 

However, each department would often end up using its own systems and databases, which made sharing information more complicated and time-consuming. For example, marketing teams might rely on tedious manual methods, such as emailing promising leads to sales teams. Similarly, customer support would have to get in touch with the sales team to inform themselves about a customer’s purchase history.

Add dark data into the mix, and these siloes reach a whole new level to the detriment of both employee productivity and customer experience. Instead of all relevant parties having a readily accessible birds-eye view of a customer’s interactions with the business, they have to rely on a fragmented information ecosystem that involves lots of manual searching and chasing up essential data. These problems, in turn, have a negative impact on business resilience due to a fundamental lack of agility and adaptability.

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