Welcome to the age of digital disruptive business models and hyper collaboration. Data is becoming important and most companies are investing in big data analytics to improve their business operations. While the concept promises big benefits, implementing an effective strategy is the challenge.

The key challenge lies not in the complexity of big data itself but in the organisational structure; companies have created data silos.
Here are some key warning signs that indicate this:
1. Are you unaware of key projects being developed in other divisions?
2. Did someone mention a record, metric or a custom field that you were hearing for the first time?
3. Did two or more members of your team report completely different numbers for same data?
4. Did an employee who had resigned months ago suddenly pop up in one of the organisation’s system?

If you answered in the affirmative to any of the above questions, then there’s a strong chance that your organisation is operating with data silos.

Where do data silos come from?
Data silos can be vertical or horizontal across the organisation. Some of the reasons why silos get created are:

1. Implementation before Strategy
It is important to clearly define the strategy before choosing software and platforms. Organisations often do the reverse without a clear understanding of how data extracted from various sources will merge or talk to other systems. When different systems implemented don’t integrate seamlessly, silos get created.
With technology differences and decisions not thought through, the core IT fabric created is often one which does not accept other systems and platforms data. Data Warehousing almost always comes after the implementation of transactional and operational systems as an afterthought.

2. Over dependence on the IT department
Businesses generally lack data extraction SPOC and it's always left to IT, which is often tedious to work with and does not deliver the results expected.

3. Organisation structure
When different software are implemented without a clear strategy, they often don’t report all data points of a process, or don’t adapt and change with business processes quickly enough. Silos also get created because each department needs to use its own data to meet its own goals and responsibilities. Thus, data created and tracked in spreadsheets does n’t get shared with others in the organisation.

Silos can be a major hindrance to companies, keeping the organisation from reaching its true potential with big data solutions.

How Silos hurt organisations:

1. Slows down the decision making process
Speed of decision making, which is paramount to business success today, is the most impacted. Silos mean an increase in the time taken to transfer information from one team to another. This directly impacts the organisation's ability to respond in real time and gain a competitive advantage.

2. Analysis could be limited or completely incorrect
Every organisation aspires to be perceived as making data driven decisions. But what if the data itself is incorrect or incomplete? Getting a complete picture from data is not an easy task when data lies hidden within silos.

3. Priorities will be misaligned and decision-making uncoordinated
As mentioned earlier, the real crux of the issue is not data silos as much as organisational silos. Individual team units working hard on their own projects and towards achieving their own goals, while is good for focus, is not conducive to creating a collaborative environment. Imagine if one team is clueless about key metrics that exist in another team’s systems! And what if those metrics could make a significant impact on their own decisions?

Collaboration ensures focus on a team’s own priorities, but when balanced with other teams to share data analysis and information, contributes to the greater good of the organisation

Collaboration ensures focus on a team’s own priorities, but when balanced with other teams to share data analysis and information, contributes to the greater good of the organisation.

At InCred, we believe that IT is strategic to the business and everyone needs to have the ability to take data driven decisions with individual and common points of reference. We have taken several steps to ensure that we don’t create silos, both at an organisation structure level as well as data. Some of the steps that we have taken to ensure that data silos never happen are:

1. Strategy before Implementation
We ensured that we not only had a data strategy in place, but also the data warehouse was deployed before the first software was installed. Our IT leadership worked in depth with the business to define the landscape, business opportunity and key metrics on how to leverage data. We have strategically invested in data assimilation using a single unified platform that has the ability to scale vertically and horizontally.

Our core IT has been designed to accept all forms of data from multiple sources and formats. Data sharing capability was a key metric of evaluation for our choice of platform, software and technology.

2. Open access to all
Our employees and business partners have open access at their own terms without compromising data/ privacy and security. Each business owns their data and yet, it is available for the organisation at large. We have ensured that there is flexibility built into the system for businesses to play and present data in their own format. We have also built in ease of usage such that making changes to a data set or presentation of data is not an odious task.

3.Commitment at the leadership level
The culture and leadership at InCred is driven from the CEO downwards, which makes it standout in the crowded marketplace with differentiated offerings and a competitive edge that technology alone cannot provide. Our leadership encourages and enables everybody to consume data from a single platform. We believe that once management starts looking at data on a single platform, everybody in the organisation will think about feeding the right data to the platform.

This refreshing change from the legacy mindset gives InCred the agility and flexibility required to thrive in today’s hypercompetitive world of financial services. The days of spreadsheets will never gain a foothold within our company.

Future trends in data science further provide an opportunity to leverage the rich data captured within our data store. We are experimenting with new paradigms and technology innovation that will help us retain market leadership and service our customers better.

At InCred,ensuring that both organisation and data silos never happen is a key priority. We strongly believe in the philosophy “Prevention is better than cure”.