At the moment, cloud tools are at their peak. According to
a survey conducted in 2016
, companies use an average of 930 cloud applications to carry out their daily tasks: from file storage to customer service, social media marketing or email campaigns.
Companies are increasingly using more applications to complete even the simplest israel telegram mobile phone number list tasks because this allows them to work faster and more efficiently. However, using all these tools in parallel also increases the risk of creating so-called “information or data silos.”
What are information silos?
When using a large number of cloud applications, you have a lot of information stored in different, isolated data silos and therefore no “single source of truth.” Wikipedia provides the following definition of these silos:
«An information silo is a repository of fixed data that is under the control of one entity and is isolated from the rest of the organization, much like grain stored in a silo on a farm that is isolated from external elements. Data silos can have technical or cultural roots.»
Luckily, this drawback doesn't mean you should stop using these useful tools to work smarter. There is a more viable solution, which is to connect these tools through the cloud , also known as cloud integration.
What risks do information silos entail?
HQ Blog information Silos Inline2
1. Working in duplicate
If most of the tools you use contain information silos, you may not realize that a colleague has already solved a problem or established a process. Without this information, you will end up wasting time working on the same task, thus replicating existing content or lending a hand where it is no longer needed. Duplicated work can cause confusion and frustration, as well as increasing document clutter.
In short, technology plays a vital role in ensuring that your entire team is on the same page. Otherwise, you may find that members of your team are sending emails without your knowledge, or that the marketing team is working with data that isn’t based on information coming from the sales department (e.g. conversion rates by channel), etc.
