How to overcome data silos and improve the quality of your company data with modern data pipelines?

You cannot simply rely on intuition for decision-making for your company. In today's data-driven world, the reliability factor is data-qualitative and quantitative facts documented in your business applications and spreadsheets. Increasing competition indicates that making decisions backed by numbers to support our choices is imperative. 

Whether it is data about your consumers, suppliers, associates, teams, and anyone or anything else involved in your business processes, data comes in different shapes and sizes, making it unmanageable. Recurring problems with data include duplicate entries, obsolete information, human errors, and undesirable data silos. Data silos stall the decision-making process, which hampers your business growth. Knowing what they are, how they impact your team, and how to unravel them makes all the difference.

What are data silos?

Human resources, finance, administration, marketing teams, and other departments need and create different data to do their work. They tend to store their data in different locations known as data or information silos. A data silo is a group of data held by one department that is not easily or fully accessible by the rest of the organization. As the amount and variety of data assets increase, data silos also extend. 

Why is siloed data a problem? 

Data silos may seem harmless, but siloed data constructs barriers to transparency, data sharing, and collaboration across departments. Due to inconsistencies in the information that may coincide across silos, data quality often suffers. 

Siloed data makes it challenging to get a holistic perspective of company data. 

C-level executives consolidate all the company's data. If you are that executive making the calls, you know your marketing team will share several leads and traffic, sales teams share about new clients, and the accounts department can give you a report of expenditures and proceeds. But what connects all that data?

Trying to handle a business with isolated information is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle without a picture on the box. Data silos prevent you from having a 360-degree view of your company. 

As discussed, managers should want to make decisions based on data. But suppose the heads of departments cannot see the larger picture and have access to fragments of the data. In that case, their individual decisions will rarely be aligned with the company's common business goal and vision.

They slow the pace of your business.

Because of disintegrated data, teams often have to wait until they learn they require data they don't possess, locate where the data lies within the company, manually acquire access to it, and then investigate it for their objectives. And by the time you organize the data, it may no longer be valid.

They waste storage space.

If every single employee who requires the same information saves it to their company storage folder, that wastes storage space and your budget on storing data you do not need. Wouldn't it save a lot of space if the data was streamlined onto one platform accessible by all employees within that organization?

How can you overcome the problem of data silos? 

A data pipeline is a sequence of stages that migrate raw data from a source and replicate it at the destination. Modern data pipelines can help you overcome siloed data, facilitate seamless integration, and democratize data within your organization. They enable quick data analysis for business insights by migrating and converging data from all your diverse sources and integrating it into a staging warehouse. They eliminate most manual steps from the process and allow a smooth, automatic data flow from one point to another. 

The AirQuery way of getting rid of siloed data 

AirQuery's Data Jump pipelines, developed for reliable data delivery, are intuitive and can automatically integrate data from over 200 databases and business applications used across the organization. They smartly consolidate data from various teams, including finance, operations, supply chain, marketing, product, and manufacturing, enabling leaders to focus on data analysis and insights rather than foraging and assembling information manually. For instance, if an HR manager has to evaluate the performance of employees, instead of getting in touch with individual departments they work under, they can access all the data they need by integrating all the data from different sources. It saves a lot of time, fastens the decision-making process, and avoids the problem of data inconsistency and inaccuracy. 

When you break down data silos and have your various databases talking to each other, you notice the benefits instantly. Nothing makes your organization more efficient than maintaining high-quality databases enriched by all the applications you use across your business. Don't believe us? Try it for yourself first, and get a free demo by reaching out to us here: https://www.airquery.com/contact