Executive Summary

Information technology has advanced the organizational productivity, at the same time it has

some adverse effects on the organization. There is presence of data silos which are hindering

organizational efficiency. This report contains the details about data silos, the business systems

are data silos of Luton Town Residences (LTR) are evaluated that how these systems are the

obstacle in effective communication. Last part includes the recommendations for LTR in order to

break the data silos. Silos at workplace are not good. Therefore, for business success, growth and

productivity business should avoid the creation of silos.

With the introduction of the internet and advanced technology, the organizational productivity

has been facilitated, while at the same time it is promoting organizational “silo effect”. Despite

of significant importance and advantages of the internet and IT tools, there are some negative

impacts of technology on organizational success and productivity, creating silos among the

employees and different organizational departments. Leaders and other employees are engaged

in their work, they don’t discuss their goals and projects with other leaders and employees

(Lomotey and Deters, 2012). They are not willing to share the information with other

departments. In order to explain and discuss Data Silos and internal communication this reported

is developed. Luton Town Residences is under consideration organization in this report, whose

business systems and data silos are evaluated.

Luton Town Residences (LTR) is a Housing Company, which is operation in Luton with an

objective to provide appropriate housing facility to the local community with different modern

facilities.

Overview of current business systems for internal communication: 300

The communication between customers and the LTR employees is mostly taken via emails. The

employees of LTR face great difficulty because of the emails which they receive from the

customers on a regular basis.

The employees are well informed about the vital information of the organization through emails

and newsletters. It has been observed that employees of LTR organization mostly ignored the

key message or key information because of which mangers must have to send a reminder

message after sending newsletters to employees.

entertained on time. The customer’s services team mostly does not coordinate with each other on

time which creates problems for the customers as well as for the organization.

The employees are facilitated with laptops to perform the work. It has been observed that the

personal coaches work to facilitate the employees and housing resident. Most employees are

observed to work on their personal computers which are managed centrally. Employees can

easily approach to SharePoint with the help of local storage area which they can manage and

access easily. This SharePoint is controlled by the finance manager to have complete control

over the financial documents.

Every information gets passed by personal coaches and all confidential information is

communicated via emails in supported housing to make sure that whether the information is

secured or not.

In this organization information or data in the beginning is recorded in unstructured manners

after that all the data are structured and put into the database quickly to avoid handwritten

mistakes.

The organization has both formal and informal communication channels in the organization. This

organization believes in peer to peer communication rather than the vertical and traditional

approach of communication in the organization which only take place up to down, down to up in

the organization.

Data Silos with reference to academic concepts:

The Data Silos are defined as the isolated group of data or information, it is a source of fixed

data which is being operated and controlled by one department and remain isolated from the rest

of the organization. Data silos can have technical or cultural basis (Speiser and Harth, 2011).
Data silos are also created where the data is stored in such a way that it becomes unreadable and

inaccessible by the different data tools organization is using for data collection and storage.

In LTR, the business is making all possible efforts to eliminate the data silos. Still there are

four major data silos observed in LTR.

1. The finance team is using Spread sheets, Word Documents and Sage One Accounting

software. It is storing all its information on a shared folder. This folder has restricted

authorization. In other words everyone in the organization cannot access the financial

information of the business (Gardner, 2005).

2. The facilities maintenance team is using the cloud-based system, known as 360 facility

for managing their facilities. Only the team of this department can access the information.

It is again a fixed data controlled by one department only.

3. Customer service department is using Spread sheets and plain text for storing

information. They also not allow the access to the data and information.

4. The Personal Coaches have the responsibility to keep the personal information of

residents confidential and sensitive (Glaser 2011). It is stored in a secured password-

protected Word file. Only the Leader of the Supported Housing Team Leader have the

access to this file. This information is not shared by any other functional department. s

All these data silos are influencing the business efficiency and leading to “silo effect”. The silo

effect in an organization is referred as the lack of communication among the employees within

the same workplace. Silo effect defines that different functional departments are working on

different sub-goals despite of have a one common goal of the organization. They are not intended

to work together. In other words we can say that Silo effect is lack of flow of information from

one group of the organization to other group (Damiani, 2015). Similar is the case with LTR, all
the four functional departments in LTR as mentioned above are not willing to share even the

basic information of their departments, which may be useful for other departments. Like the

basic information not personal information collected by Personal coaches can used by customer

service in order to improve the facilities in the housing scheme.

Figure 1: Silo Effect

Berlo (1960) adopted a different approach to developing a model. He has identified the model

with the elements of communication. Berlo explained that environmental factors are controlled

for four main elements of communication: source, message, channel, and receiver.

Figure 2: Berlo Model

Recommendations:

It is essential for the business to break up the silos. Breaking the silos will lead to innovation and

also enhance the organizational productivity as the cooperation among the leaders and employees

is effective and there is an open work environment. There is constructive feedback in the

organization. In this way the organization is able to implement new ideas and break the old bad

habits leading to silos and rigidity in the organization. There are number of different strategies

that should be followed in order to reduce the silo effect in the organization. Some of these steps

that LTR should follow are:

 The procedures should be streamlined, therefore, the data is collected only once by LTR

employee. Nowadays in LTR, three different departments are collecting the data from

customers i.e. Customer service, maintenance department and personal coaches. There

should be arrangements that only once the data is collected from customers (Iemma,

Morando and Osella, 2014).

 LTR leaders should practice and share the best practices in order to provide facilities and

services to the customers

 Leaders should encourage the constructive feedback from their subordinates

 The data management system should be consolidated by LTR team. There should be an

audit of data collection methods of all the functional departments of LTR. It should be

evaluated that whether these systems are generating the relevant data or only wasting the

business resources.
  Personal coaches in LTR should be asked for their day-to-day challenges for collecting

the data from the customers. A unified central system should be adopted by the

organization that can be shared by all functional department.

 Data silos are developed when there is strict separation among the different departments

or business units. The business should break these silos and develop a culture of

communication and support across the departments. In this culture the employees should

be encouraged to share the information.

Conclusion:

In order to determine that business has Silos, the business should have some communication

challenges or if it is easy to convey information between the staff members, facilities, and

departments. In order to break the data silos and to facilitate the information and make an

effective communication among different organizational departments. Silos are considered to be

a hindrance for the organizational productivity. Business organizations like LTR should develop

bridges between all the departments for better cooperation. Breaking the silos will increase the

organizational productivity, increases the innovation.

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