I feel like I have quite a bit of experience in information silos as at my previous job it was something we tried to tackle. As a business analyst/client service manager, we were fully accountable for the books of business we ran. Although each person knew of the general guidelines to managing their books, we were still allowed to run our books however we saw fit. Therefore, there would be ways that I would experiment on my advertising campaigns that another person wouldn’t dare to on theirs. Operating in that manner creates information silos as if you have a question, you will probably get different answers depending on who you ask.
In David Newman’s article, Overcoming Silos: Evolving From Stand-Alone Information Architectures to Shared-Information Architectures for the Emerging Data Economy, he dives into ways that companies can transform from data silos to data sharing. Newman brings up great point when he states, “data silos create multiple versions of the ‘truth’, which compromise organizational agility and strategic decision making, especially during periods of rapid and unpredictable change” (Newman, 2011). I can relate to this point specifically as once my company was acquired, our siloed business analyst/client service manager team had to merge with another extremely siloed team to learn all of their processes and how they run their business. It was difficult to learn something new in a short period of time where you constantly had to question what was the truth.
Source:
Newman, D. (2011, June 03). Overcoming Silos: Evolving From Stand-Alone Information Architectures to Shared-Information Architectures for the Emerging Data Economy. Retrieved September 19, 2017, from https://www.gartner.com/doc/1712915/overcoming-silos-evolving-standalone-information