Smaller firms suffer from “silo working”, survey says
New technology is creating a worrying form of “silo working” at small firms, where information is not freely available to the whole organisation. A survey of 100 small firms employing up to 250 people has found that “do it yourself” IT is causing the problem.
The survey, commissioned by Apple database firm FileMaker, says the increasing IT skills of the office worker, coupled with the ease of use of modern technology, is creating new and worrying “micro-silos” of data at UK SME businesses.
This is putting productivity, compliance and profits at risk. Although the technology available to UK businesses has never been better, end-users are taking IT policies into their own hands.
In doing so, they are creating dangerous micro-silos of data within their organisations, typified by crucial documents being locked away on individual PCs and in e-mail accounts, creating “a wilderness of data outside existing policies and processes”, comments Derrick Cameron.
The survey found that 64% of IT managers questioned believed their business suffered from a micro-silo mentality when it came to company information, with almost half (45%) believing this is a result of poor IT management.
“IT free-styling” is now much more prevalent, with 77% thinking it is easier to create/customise critical business applications than three years ago, resulting in essential data residing with single users. “Whilst it is important that staff have a level of freedom over what they use and introduce” comment Derrick Cameron from Eximium “it is important that central data is stored centrally. Otherwise confusion will reign and important work will be replicated or at worst lost forever”.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Business Advice, IT Support, News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
