What's the problem with Information Silos?

let me give an example of Information Silos:

Consider how information is managed in one representative organization. In this
organization:

· Unstructured IM includes records management compliance . . . Information managers within one part of the company spearheaded the development of an ECM solution that supports records management to specifically address eDiscovery requirements. This targeted records management initiative addresses the content repositories housing the document types within the scope of this initiative but ignores many other content repositories housing valuable
information supporting other functions.

. . . . While other risk analysts focus on BI. Finance and risk analysts from another part of the company built a BI platform to reconcile disparate financial data from across the organization to provide management with a single source of truth to support financial reporting and risk
analysis. However, they did not scope customer, product, and employee data into this BI
initiative, and disparate versions of this other, critical data remain a problem that affects many
parts of the organization.

· The chief risk officer (CRO) spearheads strategic governance risk and compliance (GRC). . . The chief risk officer’s new initiative drives new policies and business processes to reduce legal and financial risk exposure. This initiative, driven from the CRO down, doesn’t take into account the eDiscovery efforts going on in one part of the organization or the BI efforts taking place in another group. Consequently, the CRO and her team have neither reports nor dashboards that present a unified rollup of all risks facing the enterprise nor scorecards showing how well the company is complying with GRC mandates.

. . . . Creating duplication of resources. The unfortunate result is unnecessary duplication of infrastructure, business and IT resources, applications, and other project deliverables. For
example, the records management initiative could have adopted a broader scope to consolidate
disparate enterprise content management repositories, and the BI initiative could have focused
on the creation of an enterprise data warehouse that could have reconciled and centralized a
wider variety of enterprise data.

But in this example, there is precious little sharing or reuse within and across the diverse IM initiatives. The company wastes valuable money, effort, and time and is hard pressed to document any coherent contribution to its strategic mission.

All of the example company’s projects support a single, top-down, executive-level mandate to
ensure corporate compliance with external regulations. However, per standard practices in many IT organizations, each of these initiatives has its own technical project team, and the various teams have no cross-project coordination or broader architectural strategy that might harmonize their efforts. Senior executives find it difficult to track or align disparate IM initiatives against a common strategic plan. But the example shows that it’s important to keep your IM strategy in sync with your business-level planning framework and priorities to ensure that various IM initiatives contribute to strategic success imperatives, as it has become untenable for CIOs to fund disparate silos that generate a massive number of tools and repositories.