Data islands / silos.

 

As you probably understood or know this is really a problem that CIO should deal with. My question is how much, if at all, do you think your enterprise might invest in a solution that automatically discover and report on such data islands on user’s machine?

1 Comment

  • How do you propose to discover data islands on a user's machine? What if the data is private/sensitive to the user or a particular group? What if the data actually _is_ irrelevant?



    I think the best solution is a pro-active one: build tools that users will _want_ to use and train them on how to use these tools. In this way, data that needs to be centralized, can be because users will be encouraged to move the data into a central location.



    The interface for this may be a web application, a winforms application, or as simple as a file share where they can drop the dreaded Excel spreadsheet.



    If the *culture of sharing* is nourished and the tools required to make it not only possibly, but easy and highly accessible are made available to the users, then data islands should never come into existence.



    The main problem today, I think, is that's it's not easy enough and the culture of sharing doesn't exist, whether it's because users are looking out for their best interest/their unit's best interest or because user's simply don't understand the larger picture; they don't realize how much benefit the organization as a whole can achieve from efficient and timely sharing of knowledge.

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