Is there a bigger Human related issue?
Information Silos – Islands in stream of corporate consciousness
Why do we have so many information silos? Information silos are created in several ways:
Management vision:
- lack of sharing of corporate and cross departmental information
- Information as a corporate asset is not recognized
- lack of trust
- lack of recognition that users view information as a “fact in time” that then drives new questions – usually in multiple layers of detail and / or broadening to include other information that is or is not related in the traditional (read IT sense)
- secrecy
- fear of knowledge getting into employee base
- fear of knowledge being transmitted to competitors or stakeholders
- lack of foresight
- IT budgets squandered on fads, applications or crisis of the moment
- IT architecture driving the business
- Point solutions enhancing departmental or functional knowledge silos
- Information use requirement overshadowed by “where we spend our money”
- Lack of ability to see the ‘art of the possible’ when information is shared and employees become true building blocks of success
- IT has a singular misconception of data as a resource or data as an asset – IT tied to trying to deliver applications or “reports” for end users
- Vendor bias – IT buys products that cannot handle the volumes or disparity of data within a company – includes non-company info like competition, global trends etc
- IT personalities tend to be oriented around perfection which is at odds with user perception of information – “I’ll know what I want when I see it”
- Focus on operational issues
- Lack of focus on strategic information needs
- Belief in ‘always done this way’
- Information management, distribution and availability for decisioning takes time and effort to establish and PROMOTE
- Business Training
- Business schools tend to accentuate departmental views of information largely because there is a general lack of conception if information as a corporate resource
- Management – MBA – programs continue this thinking
- Information as a corporate asset gets paid lip service to departmental views of “what is important”
- Information as an asset
- Corporations don’t treat information as an asset, but as a way to measure, manage or control
- Information about customers, stakeholders, competitors, products services, markets, all contribute to the knowledge asset of the business.
- People need access to information to enable decisioning – but we go out of our way to restrict access for reasons of power, secrecy, or technology.
IT empire building and job security for IT
Human pre-disposition towards attribution.
We need a knowledge pool, but what we have are information silos at best, maybe just application-centric data. Siloed information is a nested phenomenon, workflow-embedded versus reports, applications versus knowledge pool, knowledge pool versus actionable meaning
© Trevelyan Group LLC 2012