Chris Heaven

The term “information silos” is typically used to refer to storage mediums where extracting and sharing information isn’t easily accomplished. Some examples of silos include; paper records, email, voice mail and standalone non-networked systems. In each of these situations the person who holds the data becomes a gatekeeper who needs to be consulted each time somebody wants to access the information. This makes communication amongst employees – and even with your customers – difficult to achieve in a timely and unfettered manner.

Think about the following in your organization …

How much time is wasted moving people to the physical location of paper records to utilize the information in them?

How much time is wasted having email conversations where the questions could have been easily answered by storing simple things like customer contact details, employee calendars and job schedules in a central location?

How much time is wasted trying to find  current revisions of documents, spreadsheets and presentations?

How much time is wasted playing “phone tag” trying to get answers to simple questions such as; where are my employees/co-workers today and what are they doing?

How much time is wasted for outside workers calling into the office seeking information from administrative personnel? Conversely how much time is wasted by administrative people calling field workers for information that could have been easily accessed through common records on the network?

In a nutshell silos reduce productivity and frustrate people who increasingly expect information to be readily available and complete. Silos are the major reason why most operations are not getting the full advantage of the network’s ability to interconnect business processes.

In future posts I’ll discuss how to break your information out of silos through the use of effective collaboration tools and business practices.

Cheers,