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How Data Hoarding or Data Silos Undermine Your Association

 

A recent article from MIT lays out the “case for building a data sharing culture” in an organization. It promotes findings that data sharing improves data analysis, leading to better decisions and enriching the organization’s internal and external relationships.

The challenge for most entities, including associations, is data hoarders and data silos within the organization. Data hoarders and silos undermine an association’s ability to serve its mission. They do this, in part, by lowering productivity and limiting the value the association can extract from its collected information.

Data Hoarders Explained

Data hoarders collect information that they don’t use. They collect it because they can. They don’t consider whether it’s useful information or whether they will store it so it’s accessible.

Let’s look at event sign-in sheets that ask attendees how they heard about the event. This information could be useful if stored properly. Yet, the data hoarder collects the forms and never looks at them again. 

One risk of hoarding data is not storing it in an accessible, structured way. Nobody, including the hoarder, can search or process the data. Knowing how members heard about the event is a valuable piece of information. Most, if not all associations want to learn about how members find their way to an association event. If a data hoarder put the forms in a file somewhere or scanned them into a file on their local drive, they never include that information in the reports/analysis of the meeting. The association is now making decisions based on incomplete data. A key attribute of hoarding is that the hoarder can’t find what they need when they need it. Indeed, they likely forget they even have it.

Another common example of data hoarding is importing large amounts of information simply because it’s available. The data hoarder might import organizational structure information for all the clients instead of just for the clients they need. When they have more data than they can handle, it’s hard to maintain and goes stale. Now the data hoarder loses trust in the data and blames the centralized data source.

Data Silos Explained

Data silos occur when staff and departments within an association collect data, but keep complete control over it and they don’t share it. 

Association employees can create data silos in multiple ways:

  • Exporting subsets of data from a centralized system into local Excel spreadsheets.
  • Creating their own data collections in files that are local to their computer or set to private if stored on a shared drive. Two common formats for these private data collections are Excel and email contact records (e.g. Outlook or Google contact).
  • Subscribing to an online software without outside approval or knowledge. It could be any sort of software application, such as project or contact management.

They create data silos for many reasons:

  • A sense that they’re working in competition against other people or departments, and that their perceived value may go down if others can access their data directly.
  • Concern that data they don’t control will not be accurate.
  • They’re more comfortable working in familiar applications, like Excel or Outlook, rather than work in new applications with different interfaces and workflows.

Unfortunately, data silos lead to stale data, either within the silos or the association’s centralized databases. Sometimes, the employee is keeping their data silo updated, which means current information isn’t getting into the centralized systems. As people relying on the centralized system see inaccurate data, they’ll start creating their own data silos.

In other cases, information in a centralized system keeps getting updated, but the data silo user doesn’t have any of that data. They’re now working from stale information, leading to frustration and low productivity.

When an employee with data silos leaves the organization, that presents a significant risk that the association is also losing valuable institutional knowledge.

Building Trust in Organizational Data 

Lost trust in the organization’s data is a major consequence of both data hoarding and data silos. When there’s little trust in the data and everyone works mostly with their own information, associations have a harder time achieving their goals. 

Analysis by Gartner concludes that those organizations that build a trusting, data sharing culture will:

  • Outperform their peers.
  • Extract business value from their data.
  • Expand revenue-generating opportunities.

The first step to building trust and data sharing is to find the data hoarders and silos within your association. 

Conducting a software audit: Accounting for every software used by the organization will reveal redundancies, under-used software, unapproved applications, and localized software that only one or few people can access (for other than legitimate security reasons).

Cataloging association data: Document – in detail – all your data sources and what data each source stores. This data catalog will uncover where the same data points exist in multiple sources, risking confusion and generating distrust. When you pull back the curtain, you might find a member with a record in three different data sources. Getting rid of redundant records and data sources builds trust in the remaining data.

Document workflows: Understanding how employees complete their tasks will uncover those local files and personal data sources that weren’t found cataloging your association’s data. It will also help identify where and how data in different systems goes bad.

With these steps, you’ll get a macro and micro vision of your association’s data, making it easier to integrate the valuable systems into a single source of truth. Having a single source of truth builds trust in data and maintains institutional knowledge separate from any one individual.

Integrated, Reliable Data Strengthens Your Association

When all your employees work from clean, current, integrated data, they are more able to achieve association goals from improving revenue and retention to lowering overhead costs.

Instead of having staff members from different teams withhold their own information about contacts made with members, all employees should be able to have the access to update the same contact record with their respective notes. Now, when a membership manager updates a member’s contact record with a recent call soliciting a donation, all departments can see that note and hold off on contacting that member again too soon.

In fact, a lot is often going on in departments that people in other departments don’t know about, but which have a profound effect on an individual’s membership and level of engagement. With integrated, reliable data, the association can run more nuanced analysis and reporting. 

For example, data analysis finds that there are members who used to make a holiday donation every year but haven’t in the current year. This is valuable information for the membership department for retention follow up. This type of data analysis and automated notification workflows only happens when data is integrated and trusted.

Building trust and data sharing within your organization can also help cushion employees from burn out. Association employees often feel overworked and under-resourced. Having a single source of truth simplifies workflows and allows employees to focus on their value-driven work rather than data management.

Data Sharing is Smart Business

Associations that take control of data management and break down the silo and hoarder barriers can achieve more with their data and data analysis. The Gartner Chief Data Officer study found that organizations that “successfully executed data-sharing initiatives … are 1.7 times more effective at showing business value and return on investment from their data analytics strategy.”

Other research on the value of data sharing reports that organizations experience a:

  • 14% increase in workflow efficiency
  • 15% improvement in customer satisfaction
  • 11% reduction in costs

These are high-impact numbers that can translate into more revenue and resources to the association, enabling it to serve and grow its membership. Replacing data hoarding and silos with an integrated system is a powerful step to building a culture of sharing and collaboration throughout the association.  For additional support with data-related challenges and initiatives, contact the team at IntelliData: 844.237.DATA (3282) or info@intellidata.tech.