Streamlining data is crucial for maintaining efficient business operations, but many companies are still working with data silos. Some business owners don’t want to get on board with new technology, and others don’t have a budget for extra tools. However, it’s in a business’ interest to do whatever’s required to create a budget for centralizing their data.
Trying to track data across multiple applications and systems is one of the fastest ways to hurt your bottom line. Centralizing that data is the fastest way to increase the accuracy of data insights, save time and money, and increase your profits.
What is centralized data?
It’s a term many people discuss, but what is centralized data? In general, data centralization takes a variety of data from different sources and puts it all into one location so it can be more effectively accessed, managed, and processed. Often, this involves feeding data from various sources into one system for humans to access, but some applications actually use data from other applications for automated calculations so that data will be reflected in reports.
There are some key benefits to centralizing data:
- Your team won’t take shortcuts. Manually cleaning up and preparing data from multiple sources is a chore. Sometimes, employees cut corners to save time or meet difficult deadlines, which compromises the integrity of the data.
- It fosters collaboration. Often, there are teams that should be collaborating but don’t because they don’t share data. This can make it feel like a competition rather than a collaboration. Teams with a collaborative mindset get more done and achieve greater results than those with a competitive attitude.
- It supports transparency. When everyone has access to the same data, it’s harder to hide issues from people who need to know about those problems.
- It supports more accurate data-driven decisions. The less time people have to spend manually collecting and organizing data, the better. Let the raw data speak for itself without being filtered through manual calculations, which are prone to error.
To understand why centralized data matters, it’s important to first have a solid grasp on the problem of data silos.
Data silos: the problem centralized data solves
The word silo is derived from the Greek word siros, which is basically a grain pit. If you’ve ever worked on a farm or in an agricultural setting, you’ll notice farmers have grain silos for the bulk storage of feed and other materials, like coal and wood chips. The silos of the past were actual pits in the ground, while today, they are massive structures made of metal that extend into vertical space.
In the farming world, silos are great for keeping different types of feed and materials separated so they never get mixed together. While silos are ideal for separating grain and coal, they’re not ideal for data.
A data silo is just like a grain silo – the contents are invisible and inaccessible to certain people, and data from various sources never mixes. The problem with this is no single source of data can provide a complete view. With data silos, employees from each department are constantly making decisions without having all of the information that might influence their actions. This can lead to a host of problems, including having to redo plenty of work, a lack of collaboration, arguments, and possibly even total business failure.
Employees working for a company that operates with data silos have to manually collect data from a bunch of sources and try to put it all together in a meaningful context. Most of the time, this doesn’t even happen because it’s tedious, cumbersome work.
Data silos are the enemy of effective data-driven decisions. You can’t get accurate insights from isolated sources of data.
Centralizing data is the answer
There are many ways to bring data into a central location, but the easiest way is to use software that will combine all your important data points and process that data into meaningful reports. The positive impact this has on a company can be massive. For example, when PAM Transport started using the fleet management software from Cetaris to eliminate data silos, they increased operational efficiency, started getting better insights, and had smoother workflows. All of these factors greatly contributed to their overall success as a company.
If your business is still working with data silos, now is the perfect time to embrace a new way of operating where your most important data is centralized and easy to access. When you do, employee workflows will be smoother, your data-driven decisions will be more accurate, and your business will become more profitable.
