Demolishing Data Siloes Could Be Your Next Big Opportunity

We all know that good data is the key to quality decision making, but most organizations are sitting on a blind spot.  Uncovering it could be the key to gaining a fresh advantage in 2023. 

What is that blind spot? 

Data silos. The truth is, there is under-leveraged data hiding in every business, data that could be giving you an advantage over the competition:

How do you uncover it?

The challenge of demolishing data silos has two parts - first is uncovering the ROI-rich disconnects that exist within your business.  Disconnects commonly occur at the intersection of different business units.  A common one happens between sales and product development teams:

Sales may be comfortable working in Salesforce, while dev teams may prefer to work in JIRA or other industry-specific applications.

Both systems host data that could be useful to the other and give your business a competitive advantage. 

For example, product update information from developers and more granular customer details from sales could be exchanged in real-time to provide better customer service, and inform product design about customer attributes that could aid in the design process:

These disconnects don’t just mean lost opportunity, they mean increased overhead since these value-producing activities are almost certainly being performed via manual workaround. Each activity is necessary to the respective teams’ roles:

Duplication of effort here could be reduced through automation and improved data flow. 

But does each unit know about the data of the other?  Additionally, do they understand the full recency and depth of the other team’s data, and understand how they stand to benefit from sharing with other departments?  Possibly not.

If you’ve invested in building a modern data infrastructure you may already host all of your data in one place or have an aggregate view.  If you have, you are already ahead of the competition. However, if you’re still working to bring the entirety of your data into view, we can help: 

We help our clients map their data and create a plan to bring the most valuable data to the forefront of their business. 

Not all data is created equal. In many cases, the pool of data is too vast to justify the budget needed to bring it all together.  That’s why experts who can analyze your system & data can help you determine what kind of data-bridging will be possible, and which data will be most valuable to your business.  

From there, you can select the high-ROI connections that will make the biggest difference to your day-to-day operations. This is an essential step in working toward leveraging your siloed data. 

After you’ve gained a global view of your data and determined which of it will be most useful, the second challenge is deciding how your organization will expose that data to internal users:

A number of questions need to be answered:

• Which tools will be used to do that?

• How will these tools speak to each other? 

• What will reporting look like in your organization? 

• Who can access these reports?

• What kind of data will they contain?  

We can help you devise a plan for how to best utilize your data.  We’ll determine the best tools, reports, and data sets to use to help achieve your goals.  Once that’s done, we’ll take it a step further and design beautiful Salesforce UI’s that will help your users do their best work.

We did just that for a client recently, who tapped our services to create bidirectional communication between their sales and product development teams. 

Taking the time to break down data silos through improved data flow and automation, can not only reduce overhead, it can hep you harvest new opportunities and better serve your customers.  Things like faster and more accurate customer service becomes possible, as well as having a better informed and more responsive product design process. 

Want to talk about your organization’s data flow? We love talking data, and have a team of experts who can help.