Data silos can be a major problem for startups. They stop the flow of information and limit your ability to make data-driven decisions, especially as you start growing your team. In this blog post, we’ll explore what data silos are, why they’re bad for your business, and how Allo helps you avoid them.

What are data silos?

Data silos are created when information is stored by a single department or business unit and is not easily accessible or integrated within a company. These silos can be created for a variety of reasons, whether it’s a poorly communicated tech stack, a competitive business culture, or even a small organizational misstep.data analysis

As you’re building a company, you might be trying out different tools to see what works best for you and your team. In fact, according to Statista, the average number of SaaS apps used by organizations around the world dramatically increased to 110 apps in 2021.

In startups for example, your sales team may store their information in one platform, while your financial data may be stored in another. When this happens, you’re more likely to get a fragmented view of data, making it difficult to make informed decisions.

How to identify data silos in your organization

Observe your team and ask yourself a few questions.

Does the data shared by one team regularly conflict with another? Are your team members feeling lost and asking where to find certain metrics related to their goals and projects? Are your product, sales, and marketing teams struggling to stay aligned on what’s going on with each team before their next launch?

If you said ‘yes’ to any of these questions, it’s likely you have a data silo impacting your business.

Why do data silos form?

While there are a variety of reasons that data silos exist, we can narrow them down to two main causes:

1. Lack of communication and trust between teams
2. Not enough integration between platforms

What problems do data silos create for startups?

Small businesses and startups face a unique set of challenges, and data silos make it even harder for these organizations to succeed. Here are just a few ways data silos can harm your business:

Delay important decision-making

To succeed, your startup needs to be ready to pivot and adapt to sudden changes. Scattered information blocks your ability to identify potential risk signals early on, leading to serious consequences for your business.

In order to analyze and understand the impact of a pricing change or new product offering for your customers, you need full access to customer and sales data to make an informed decision based on existing behavior. If you’re unable to bring in key figures in a short period of time, you can get left behind quickly.

Inefficient use of resources

When launching a business, you often have limited resources, and data silos are the enemy of efficiency. Take the example we talked about above with using different platforms to store information.

Each platform requires its own resources, whether that be a server, storage, or a dedicated team member to maintain it. This can result in efforts duplicated at a higher cost, instead of focusing a select number of resources on a single, integrated system.

Silo Mentality

Difficulty in collaborating or sharing information can lead to silo mentality, or the selective sharing of information with a team. Silos limit team communication, often leading departments to focus solely on their own objectives, rather than share their findings with other teams.

This lack of sharing and collaboration is a people problem, one that may arise because of a lack of trust or visibility in the workplace that leads to teams or individuals isolating themselves or their work material, making it difficult to work effectively as a team.

Limited visibility and insights

Data silos can also limit the visibility a startup has into its business. With fragmented data, a complete view of business and teams is hard to come by.

If you’re managing your customer and sales data across different platforms, it’s going to be difficult to see and understand the overall impact of your business decisions on the full customer and sales journey, leading to missed opportunities and misaligned decision making.

How leaders can eliminate data silos

The consequences imposed by data silos can be difficult to overcome - but don’t let that discourage you. Here are a few steps you can take to get rid of data silos and ensure your startup has a single, integrated view of your data.

Adopt a data-driven culture

Data is a key asset that should inform decision-making across all levels of your business. To create a data-driven culture, an organization needs to provide visibility for its most relevant data sets and platforms.

By adopting a company culture that is data-driven and people-oriented, your organization is much more likely to move data efficiently from one team to another and make more strategic decisions.

Implement a single knowledge base

To avoid data silos, it’s important to have a single source of truth for data within your startup. Not only does this build trust and comfort for your employees, but it helps your team avoid any miscommunication or conflicts early on.

This can be done in a few ways, such as:

1. Using a communication channel that sends daily metric updates
2. Creating informational guides that are accessible across your organization
3. Incorporating a central database built for storing data

Use Integrations and APIs

It’s likely that no matter how much you try to narrow down your techstack, your startup will still be juggling several tools at all times. Integrations and APIs are a great way to connect different tools and platforms into one source.

Certain platforms, like Allo, give your team real-time previews of how work is moving across third-party apps and platforms, so you can even understand where a team is at, or access their resources with the click of a button.

By integrating your data, you connect a variety of different systems and are able to share data and information seamlessly, without the need for any major manual data entry or imports/exports.

How Allo’s real-time management and collaboration platform can help

Allo helps you break down data silos by  managing your team, work, and documentation all in one place.

With Allo, you can build trust between teams through visibility. Everyone has a clear understanding of how you’re making progress at a glance and knows who is connected to what project, so you can avoid the headaches and losses caused by data silos and misalignment.

Now’s a great time to join Allo’s exclusive Early Access Program, and see first-hand how it can help your team eliminate data silos in your startup.

Here’s a quick video to learn more:

As one of Allo's exclusive early access partners, you receive exclusive benefits like:

• A free 45-minute strategy session with one of our product experts to help you set up, manage, and align your team using Allo
• A dedicated customer success specialist available for 1:1 support
• Playbooks and recommendations customized to your team
• Unlimited access to all of Allo’s features through an extended free trial