5 Ways Process Reengineering Eliminates Data Silos and Aligns Technology with Business Needs
Key takeaways
- Data silos are a collection of data held by one group/department that is not fully or easily accessible by other groups/departments.
- Finance, administration, HR, marketing teams often require collating data from other departments/teams for their work.
- Although data silos may seem harmless, siloed data creates barriers to information sharing and cross-team collaboration.
- Misalignment of technology and the business needs in an organization leads to improper use of technology and business needs not being met.
- Process reengineering entails the complete redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in productivity, cycle times, quality, and customer satisfaction.
- Reengineering processes can eliminate data silos and align business needs with technology.
Data Silos – What are they and Why are they a problem?
Data silos or information silos refer to a set of information or data that is accessible only to certain groups within the organization. When we say data is siloed, we mean that it is somewhere out of reach. A data silo occurs when information pertaining to a customer or a business is stored in various places, as a result the data is not accessible to a lot of teams or not accessible at all.
For example, a customer support representative may not be able to provide effective resolutions to a customer because of data silos that restrict access to information. Here, data silos are problematic and bring down the quality of customer service. Siloed data can be a problem because they reduce the collaboration and transparency within an organization, create communication barriers, result in compromised customer experiences, and lead to an overall lack of adaptability. What are the other ways in which data silos prove to be problematic?
Table of Contents
Create barriers between teams
Since siloed data is partially available or fully not available, it creates barriers that hamper collaborative work. Data silos also prevent team and customer experience agility and hinder swift and informed decision making. They can also cause a lack of team cooperation and coordination.
Bring down productivity
In customer support, data silos force agents to spend a lot of time tracking down the right information. This reduces the overall productivity and operational efficiency. In some cases, lack of access to complete information also results in erroneous resolution of customer issues.
Increased costs and missed sales opportunities
Decreased productivity due to lack of access to information results in inefficiencies. These inefficiencies in turn impact the business bottom line. Disconnected systems result in agents needing access to many systems, which in turn leads to increased costs towards unnecessary licenses. On top of all this, dealing with data silos results in missed sales and upselling opportunities.
Cause poor customer experiences
Data silos can also create a burden that is ultimately borne by the customer. A recent survey results reveal that only 31% of the agents are able to effectively see and use customer data to improve and personalize experiences. Reduced agent productivity and lack of access to complete information will impact customer satisfaction. Lack of easy access to information causes long wait times, endless call transfers, and customers repeating themselves.
Hamper adaptability and agility
Data silos can cause your team to lack agility and adaptability. Essentially your company can slacken in responding to change because you will be unable to act on your data or derive clear insights from it. Data silos make it harder to address customer issues, cause data fatigue, and create challenges for informed decision making.
Misalignment of Business Needs and Technology
Misalignment of the business needs with technology is a common issue faced in organizations. When the existing technology does not meet the business requirements, misalignment occurs. The gap between business units and IT departments can lead to technology investments that do not fully meet the needs or contribute to its strategic objectives. Aligning technology with business goals is critical for organizational success. There are some challenges in aligning technology with business goals, as listed below –
Resistance to change
The biggest challenge to adoption of appropriate technology for achieving business goals is to change within the organization. Employees may be in the comfort zone of familiar technology, which makes them resist change.
Keeping pace with emerging technology
New technology emerges rapidly, making it difficult for companies to stay updated. Especially in organizations with limited resources, staying updated with technological advancements may pose a challenge.
High costs of technology alignment
The financial aspect of aligning technology with business requirements is another impeding factor to tech alignment. Costs associated with upgrading or implementing new systems may strain budgets.
Technological alignment process is not just beneficial but essential for the survival of the business. The journey towards technological alignment may be complex and challenging, but the rewards like enhanced efficiency, effective decision making, increased agility, are well worth it.
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What is Process Reengineering?
Process reengineering or business process reengineering (BPR) is the complete overhauling of a business process that targets significant improvements in productivity, cycle times, product quality, and the satisfaction of employees and customers. Process reengineering is about reinventing work by scrutinizing existing processes and starting over from scratch. Reengineering is not just about cutting costs, it is about fundamentally changing the way processes are done to achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness.
Is business process reengineering the same as business process improvement? At the outset, both these terms may seem like the same thing. Business process improvement might require minor tweaking of a few rules here and there, while BPR looks beyond defined boundaries to bring about radical changes. Techniques like process mining can help discover, monitor, and improve processes. An important factor in BPR is rethinking the role of third parties in the process.
7 Steps in Business Process Reengineering
- Refocusing company values on customer needs and eliminating low value work
- Simplifying and standardizing tasks that are too complex by automating repetitive work
- Enabling processes with modern systems and data
- Carrying out work in a highly efficient and effective environment
- Reorganizing a business into cross-functional teams and assigning the responsibility for a process
- Rethinking basic operational and people issues
- Determining and assigning roles to third-parties or outsourcers
How Does Process Reengineering Eliminate Data Silos?
Process reengineering involves the reorganization of business processes for better collaboration. The first step in reengineering is to analyze the existing process. This analysis helps spot data silos. In most scenarios, data silos are created by humans. These occur when company divisions do not communicate with each other. As a result data for a specific department is located within that department and those outside that department cannot access it. Process reengineering improves collaboration between departments and teams and breaks down data silos.
In the reengineering process, new technology is adopted for integrating different teams so that they communicate seamlessly with each other. While reengineering a process, make sure you adopt the right tools that provide a unified view of data across departments. A customer data platform (CDP) is an example of such a tool. Once a CDP is installed, you must ensure that all your applications are talking to each other. While choosing a CDP make sure that it has integration capabilities so that it can connect to other applications.
A workflow automation solution like Cflow offers the ability to link multiple processes so that data silos do not exist.
How Does Process Reengineering Align Technology with Business Needs?
As discussed above, misalignment of technology with business needs is unfavorable for the business. When the alignment is missing, the technology might work, but it might not deliver an outcome that the business needs. IT business alignment can be implemented by reengineering the process. During process reengineering redundant tasks and technology is identified. Once these are identified, the appropriate technology that aligns with business needs can replace the redundant one.
Traditionally, business professionals and IT departments operate in their own functional silos. Business process reengineering enables better planning and roadmap collaboration to improve and develop the highest impacting areas to the business. Cflow can be used as a workflow tool that can map existing processes for identifying redundancies and automating repetitive steps.
Conclusion
Data silos and misaligned IT and business needs can impact the business bottom line. Eliminating data silos is a must for improving performance of the business. Process reengineering evaluates processes and helps identify data and functional silos. Once these are identified, the right workflow tools can be used to eliminate data silos. Misalignment of IT and business needs is another pain point in businesses that rely on traditional systems. Business process reengineering can align IT-business needs seamlessly by mapping out processes and matching them with the technology. A no code workflow automation tool like Cflow can make business process reengineering more effective. Sign up for the free trial to see Cflow in action.
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