3 Ways You Can Eliminate Silos to Accelerate Digital Transformation

Digital transformation–you’ve read about it, heard about it, and discussed it. Your company likely feels incessant pressure to leverage it for competitive advantage, greater efficiency, reduced cost, and financial growth. It’s clear that companies realize the value of digital transformation, as Gartner states that 91 percent of businesses are engaged in some form of digital initiative, and 87 percent of senior business leaders consider digitalization a priority. 

However, successfully embarking on a digital transformation journey is challenging as 70 percent of digital transformations fail, and execs claim that siloed processes can be the main obstacle to a healthy digital culture. To succeed and reap the benefits of digital transformation, organizations must be aware of and know how to remove the four main types of silos.  

The four types of silos that stall digital transformation are: data, technology, content, and departmental. Any of these silos can cause data security and regulatory compliance issues, reduced productivity, underutilized or inconsistent data, poor visibility, and lack of innovation. Here are 3 ways your organization eliminate these silos:

1. Better collaboration across the organization:

 Often large enterprises operate in team silos without seamless interactions. Lack of interaction creates communication bottlenecks and builds resistance to change. To build confidence and provide empowerment, key business stakeholders must be involved in planning and strategy meetings. Those stakeholders should then share important updates and information across their teams.  

Expose employees in every department to innovative solutions and ideas, even if they don’t affect day-to-day work responsibilities. Such exposure helps create consistent top-down messaging and branding while fostering a positive, corporate-wide, team-building environment. 

2. Enforced, proven change management protocol:

 Gartner cites that the typical organization today has undertaken five major firm-wide changes in the past three years–and nearly 75 percent expect to multiply the major change initiatives they will undertake in the next three years. Yet half of the change initiatives fail, and only 34 percent clearly succeed.  

This is why implementing a well-organized change management plan in place from Day 1 of any new technology is critical. It’s not just about the technology; it’s about the people. Therefore, you should focus on how to shift their mindset and behaviors to be engaged and willing to take on new experiences. Meanwhile, you can create buy-in with a dedicated change management team or ambassadors, a clear communication plan, defined timelines/milestones, necessary training, and hands-on involvement.  

3. Smarter tools: 

Disparate systems do not allow your company to capture the full capabilities and benefits that technology has to offer. Data becomes siloed, which causes misinformation, unwanted delays, and unsatisfied employees and customers.  

To mitigate this challenge, evaluate your current tools and technology and identify what data and insights you seek. Then, decide if these elements require a new solution or a new way of using what is already available. You might seek opinions from key stakeholders in the organization, rather than only IT perspectives. Ensuring early adoption across the enterprise is critical to success.

It’s easy for businesses to be caught in the race of implementing new tech. What’s important, is ensuring that your different systems can integrate with each other to create a single source of truth, eliminating barriers between the different systems and ultimately enhancing collaboration and visibility across the entire business. 

Identifying and then eliminating silos allows your company to meet goals, create efficiencies, grow smarter, and problem-solve faster. Digital transformation doesn’t have to be impossible. It must be done wisely.