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Crystal Reports Administration: Information Silos

When people information exists in separate systems that don't interact with each other, you have an information silo.

Have you ever received a solicitation from a company you already have an existing contract with? If so, you've encountered a company inflicted by information silos.

Here are some real-life examples:

  • A termite protection service phoned a household that has had a contract with them for two years. Four times in two months.

  • A phone company mails offers to a household that doesn't have operating phone lines run to it. The former customer registered an extensive repair log over several years before giving up and cancelling his "service" with the phone company.

  • A government taxation agency sends collection notices to a taxpayer whose accounts are up to date and fully paid.

You get the picture. You don't have to think very deeply to see how costly this situation is. Not just for the duplication of effort and wasted resources, but also the toll it takes on business relationships. Information silos extract a staggering cost on productivity, as well.

You can't do anything about this problem, unless you understand its root causes. The fact you have a Crystal Reports systems in place doesn't mean you don't have information silos.

The fact you have a Crystal Reports systems in place does mean that senior management is expecting that the problems arising from information silos will not exist, because the elimination of those problems is a key selling point for investing in a business intelligence system. Unfortunately, few senior managers understand information silos and subsequently engage in silo-building behaviors themselves.

To protect your job and the interests of your organization, you need to understand what drives people to engage in silo-building behavior and meet those needs with your reporting system, instead.

More, below....
 

Tackling information silo sources

There are many reasons information silos exist. Here, we'll highlight a few of them. We will address only those issues where information silos pop up in the presence of an integrated information system.

Where an  integrated information system does not exist, this is the fault of senior management and you can change it only at that level. If accounting has one information system and sales another, this is a strategic issue for senior management to solve.

People create their own information silos primarily for these reasons:

  1. The integrated information system provides data, not reports. This is the major reason. This article will help you correct that problem: http://www.crystalkeen.com/articles/crystaladmins/reportvsdata.htm
     

  2. Users misunderstand what information they actually need. So, they collect data on their own and make decisions based on that. When the manager of Dept X meets with the manager of Dept Y, each is working from a different page and you have an adversarial contest instead of two departments of the same company working together.
     

  3. Old customs die hard. Very few people continually learn and evolve in their jobs. This is why you have heard the expression "six months of experience 40 times" in reference to a claim of "20 years of experience." People tend to go on autopilot, repeating what they learned. On the one hand, this prevents reinventing the wheel. On the other hand, it keeps people from moving forward. People who did their jobs a certain way prior to the introduction of a company-wide information system are likely to keep doing their jobs the same way. To counter this, you have to show how the new way makes their jobs easier.
     

  4. Insecurity. Someone who has been sequestering information over the past 20 years sees that practice as a source of power within the organization and is loathe to give it up. To counter this, you need to ensure these people have control. Control of what? That's a question you can answer only after finding out where their control hot buttons are. Typically, people aren't concerned so much with controlling the data as they are with having control--or at least significant input--on what gets done with the data. One way to address this is to establish advisory panels or review committees. This way, people don't feel left out of the loop and that's usually enough to settle the control issue.
     

  5. Stupidity. This is a very real problem, today. People don't read, don't perform critical analysis, and don't think about the purpose they are serving in the organization. So, they do things that are utterly stupid. For example, Jim gives his password to a client. Now you have a security breach. Angela, the VP, finds out and responds to the stupidity by sealing off an entire category of information into a silo.

    One thing you can do in response to the stupidity problem is to think about what stupid things people might do and try to make systems more "idiot-proof." You can also present information in a way that challenges people to think--to do some critical analysis and consider the reason their jobs exist in the first place. In the example with Jim, would the outcome have been different if department managers had meetings with their employees and an outside security expert to discuss security issues? You can't anticipate everything that people might do. But, you can address the important issues and ask people to think about those things themselves.

There is far more to this topic than we've presented here. We hope you will make a point of finding information silos and integrating them back into your system. Some book recommendations to help you with that are below.

Books to Help You Eliminate Information Silos

 

This article is copyrighted by Crystalkeen, Mindconnection, and Chelsea Technologies Ltd. It may be freely copied and distributed as long as the original copyright is displayed and no modifications are made to this material. Extracts are permitted. The names Crystal Reports and Seagate Info are trademarks owned by Business Objects.