People always talk about silo-ed organizations, and in the smaller companies I've worked in I haven't seen too much evidence of that. But having been at a large multi-national manufacturer this past summer for my internship, I saw silos in action. Because I was in a role where I had to drive communication and marketing plans across multiple divisions and functions (like IT, Legal, HR, Corp Marketing, etc.), I was tasked with figuring out how to communicate between all the groups.
For one project, I needed to look at social media use across the company. I assumed there would be systems monitoring and aggregating what people were doing into a central master data file, but I quickly learned that her wasn't, and that each division worked off different systems. For example, I needed information from the call center related to a certain product, and was shocked to find that the marketers for that product had no communication channel with the call center, and the only way to interact was to have the call center pull a report into Excel. Worse, the report included un-coded answers to open-ended questions which could only be analyzed by manually analyzing each of the thousands of comments - not exactly real-time business analytics!
Fortunately, the "people networks" were pretty strong between the silo-ed divisions, so I was able to get the integrated information I needed by talking to the right people. Still, it made it very plain how important it is to get off the legacy system of silos and integrate data into a central place where it can leveraged with business analytic software to get usable knowledge from the mountains of data.
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