Being a
piece of data is not as easy as it sounds. How would you like
to be trapped in a vestibule only to be accompanied by the likes of
endless tables and foreign keys? The lifecycle of a piece of
data may sound as simple as
CREATE, RETRIEVE, UPDATE, and
DELETE, but I assure you that the frustrations that
abound make life as a particle of information a bit more difficult than
you might imagine. Put another way, I could be doing much
more efficient work for my organization, but due to the way I am
treated, I am unable to even come close to reaching my
potential. But rudely, I have not even introduced myself.
My name is A. Little Datum, and I am a morsel of digital info that
lives an arduous life as a fundamental unit of information that my
company relies on to carry out its processes and uses to make important
business decisions. We are a global computer manufacturing
company with thousands of suppliers and millions of customers around
the world. Although our profit and loss statements seem to
please our directors and officers, I spend the majority of my time in
silos struggling to break free in order to interact with the data in my
company’s other information systems, all the while driving maintenance
costs up and reducing data quality. Let me give you a quick
example of a day in my life, but let’s start at the beginning when we
were a small business with under 20 employees.
Back in the day, I would find myself existing as a piece of information
that explained the supply cost our company would have to pay to
purchase
HARD DRIVE A to use in our
finished computers. At a certain time, the hard drive
manufacturer, our supplier, increased the price of
HARD
DRIVE A
by $100, and therefore it cost us $100 more to
buy each hard drive. However, our purchasing department
failed to alert the billing department of the price increase, so we
were still charging the same amount for each of our finished computers.
As a result, our gross margin was cut by $100 per computer that
we
sold. In this scenario, I only existed in the minds of the
purchasing department, and by their failing to communicate to the other
organizational departments, I was confined to the silo defined by the
purchasing department. In small companies, the silos can
exist as simply communication failures between employees of the
company, but the same problem exists (and compounds) for large
companies with robust Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
systems. Often, large companies have multiple instances of
their ERP systems (possibly a server in each country or region, or for
each line of business) rather than a single consolidated database and
therefore often experience communication failures among each other due
to poor integration of a number of systems that use the same type of
data. These larger systems replace but carry out the same
functionality as the minds of the employees in the small business, so
reliable communication between them is essential to the elimination of
silos.
My company exists today as one of the world’s largest computer
manufacturers, and I am currently residing in our US inventory system
as the product number
(#435363) of one of
the hard drives we purchase from one of our suppliers to use in the
ITTY
BITTY MODEL LAPTOP computer that we make. My
sole function as a product number in our inventory system is to track
the
#435363 hard drives as they move
through our manufacturing process (i.e. quantities on hand, quantities
on order, bills of material, work in process, and quantity
shipped). I have cousins in the other systems around the
world who are used in our manufacturing operations, but I don’t know
them very well – they have different numbers, different names, and
different attributes. As an order comes in for the
ITTY
BITTY MODEL LAPTOP, I get selected and installed in the
computer. Today, a very large order came in, and I needed the
help of my cousins to fill it. OOPS, I just ran into the silo
walls put in place because we have more than 10 different installations
of our ERP software and there is no communication among them.
I can’t find my cousins, and I don’t even know where to look – I don’t
even know who is really related to me. This must have
happened hundreds of times, and since our inventory instances could not
communicate with each other (even though we use the same ERP software
all over the world), we ended up with a plethora of orders that we were
not able to fill. Needless to say, our customers were not
happy, and we lost a large portion of our business.
I dream of the day when I am not trapped in this silo. I want
to be part of the other systems so that my company can grow, and so our
customers are happy. I want to get to know my cousins, and I
want to know their history. Most of all, I long for a family
reunion in a single, consolidated system.
Learn more about a new way to eliminate silos
quickly
