The silo tax: the hidden cost of disconnected data

“They’re for storing grain and missiles. Remind me why we hide our most useful data in them?”

 There are always strong reasons to handle research and experience data with care: breaches of privacy, compliance or commercial secrets are costly.

But good governance doesn’t have to mean preventing data from flowing between teams with similar goals. At its worst, this is just a fig leaf for tribalism or competition between departments.

Experience and insights resources can often be managed by separate teams with different reporting lines and KPIs. They may use different platforms for similar purposes.

Rigid processes and systems make sharing data hard and slow. The problem is particularly acute in large international organizations with complex structures, and not made any easier by data privacy regulations that vary widely across regions.

Consider the following[1]:

• business users spend more time each week moving or entering data than they do actually analyzing it or using it to make decisions
• nearly 50% of companies believe that disconnected data negatively impacts their organization’s ability to innovate
• nearly 50% of organizations say that disconnected data impacts their ability to meet customer needs

This pattern is repeated within different types of teams: customer analytics, product management, user experience, brand marketing, data science. All stand to gain if insights and experience data is brought together, managed consistently and made securely accessible to those who need it.

In many organizations, this silo-busting is already underway with customer data. Sales, Marketing and Service teams organize feedback and experience data through the Forsta platform: a unifying layer with open connects to third party apps such as Slack for internal collaboration or Zendesk for customer service management.”.

Experience and insights teams need a similar approach if they want to put humans at the heart of their organization’s decisions.

In a recent survey of Forsta customers, 80% agreed that comprehensive data integration means they get a fuller view of their customers.

We believe that insights and experience technology must be underpinned by frictionless data flows, open architecture and easy integrations with other software and data sources.

Such open ecosystems are founded on a strong ‘base layer’ into which a wide range of technologies can seamlessly connect: survey platforms, CRM, HR systems, social and sales data.

Connected data is more powerful. It means less duplicated work between different teams. It reveals more patterns about people. It provides richer opportunities for predictive modeling.

At Forsta, we’re privileged to work with nearly 1,000 agencies around the world, from boutique specialists to the largest international networks. Nearly two million Customer Insights & Experience professionals use our technology.

Read our full whitepaper to find out how your organization can reap the rewards of better-connected data: free up time, get more from your budget and improve the experience of your customers.