Before we delve into the nightmare of not using data management services, let us clarify one thing first.
We are not saying data silos, or the use of them, is bad.
But they do carry the possibility of contributing to your business’ inefficient performance.
Data silos house humongous amounts of business data, such as data regarding your customers, marketing efforts, and sales strategies. But the common scenario is all these data are separately contained in different physical storage facilities.
This results in a fragmented picture of your customers, marketing, sales, and all the other information categories that you have stored in your data silos.
Obviously, the danger with this set-up is you are unable to maximize your data’s potential to guide you in your decision-making. Business data should be taken, analyzed and interpreted as a whole, but data silos make it more difficult to do that.
In fact, 46 percent of survey respondents said data distributed in silos across different units is one major concern of big data analytics, while 35 percent said an ineffective coordination of various big data teams is another challenge.
Having a divided storage of business data simply makes it more challenging for you to use and make sense of them. If you have data about your customers’ online behavior separated from your content marketing data, you are simultaneously running the risk of two things. First, you may not really understand what content your online customers appreciate, and second, you may be producing content that is not as effective as it can be.
There is also the possibility of having conflicting data if they are housed in different data silos. You can just imagine the confusion this brings to the business owner or decision makers when they don’t know which data to use for planning their next sales campaign.
The nightmare comes every time you need to make a business decision that should take into consideration all the possible aspects or categories of data you have generated. Retrieving the data from different storage units means coordinating with different departments, led by different people. It’s a longer process. It’s taxing. It’s inefficient.
But going through this process is the only way for you to secure all the data you have to make well-informed decisions.
Until data management services came around.
Data management services make it possible for you to combat this nightmare by providing you the foundation for efficient, seamless, and unified data across your business organization.
Master data management, for example, creates a master file for your business, from where you can link all of your valuable business data. The result is greater accessibility and efficiency that positively impacts your whole business organization.
Moving or backing up your data to the cloud also helps improve the accessibility of your data, which is something data silos have struggled to provide. Experts recommend this for small and medium amounts of data that need to be frequently updated.
Data management services, especially those that utilize the cloud, are known for providing accessible, easy to use, efficient, reliable, and secure data storage and retrieval options without the fuss.
If you want to make strategic and well-informed business decisions, take a long, hard look at your data first.
And if you find that your data has inconsistencies, or that retrieving them for your analysis and strategic planning takes a large amount of time and effort, it may be time to consider data management services for your business.
