Yaron Morgenstern is the CEO of Glassbox, a leading provider of digital experience analytics for web and mobile applications.
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Companies don’t start out siloed — it’s often a symptom of growth. As businesses expand, different departments form and teams develop their own goals, metrics and priorities. Siloed company culture is common in the corporate world, but many executives don’t realize the scale of damage the silo mentality can inflict on an organization. Separating key decision-makers and information can stand in the way of important growth opportunities, effective collaboration and efficiency.
This division doesn’t just affect operations internally — it has a direct negative impact on customer and end-user experience. To avoid these pitfalls, business leaders should consider implementing emerging technologies across departments, prioritizing tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI).
Silo-Smashing Technologies
Digital Experience Analytics: When data and information are siloed, each department is limited by their own view, which can make it hard to collaborate, as each team is only looking at their slice of the pie. Without the full picture, departments are more likely to be in conflict, focused only on the pieces that their department owns.
Experience intelligence — a next-generation digital experience analytics solution that's powered by AI — eliminates this issue by enabling all departments to gain a full picture of the digital customer journey. When all departments are looking at the same end-to-end visualization, teams can more productively work together on projects.
The addition of AI makes collaboration easier by streamlining prioritization. Experience intelligence tools automatically analyze customer data, alerting teams to the biggest pain points that need immediate attention and quantifying revenue-driving opportunities.
DevOps AI: For those working in software and application development, DevOps practices are an essential workflow guide. Breaking down silos between developers and IT operations, DevOps is greatly enhanced by AI, streamlining team performance.
When developers are writing hundreds of lines of code daily, automated code reviews and software testing can save manpower and eliminate human error. Advanced AI technologies analyze code and make suggestions to the coder, alerting them to code flaws that could hurt application response time or expose security issues.
Using these tools, all departments involved in software or app development can swiftly identify issues in their code, working together to eliminate issues before they're more deeply integrated into the software and, therefore, harder to pull out. This increases efficiency, productivity and the quality of work, all while reducing risk and minimizing team conflict over project prioritization.
Process Automation: There can be resistance to integrating AI if some employees view it as competition. In truth, using AI tools can lead to a more high-performing team. No-code and low-code business process management (BPM), process mining and robotic process automation (RPA) tools provide employee support and alleviate workloads. BPM and process mining tools can identify high-impact opportunities within the business to install RPA. The RPA tools then work with AI to automate basic, repetitive, mundane tasks that would take human teams hundreds of hours.
Depending on the company, these tasks could include customer support (via chatbots and calls), pulling information from documents and summarizing presentations. Process automation frees up valuable employee time, allowing teams to focus their attention on creativity, high-level strategy and revenue-driving collaboration.
Intelligent Data Management: Data silos can kill productivity, waste time and stall cross-departmental processes. The results of an IDC study found that employees can spend 30% of their workdays searching for corporate information and an additional 20% duplicating data-related work. Intelligent data management solutions save valuable time and storage, smartly reorganizing complex enterprise data and making it more accessible to all departments.
Key Benefits Of AI Technologies
Easy Integration Into Existing Systems: Many businesses may choose to put off adopting AI tools that would elevate their business outcomes because they're afraid of disrupting operations and the potential lag time that comes from it. Very small businesses use an average of 40 operations-support apps, and large companies can use more than 200. Most AI technologies are designed to seamlessly integrate into current systems and APIs, making cross-departmental work much easier.
Faster Decision-Making And Increased Productivity: AI-powered tools empower data-driven decisions that have the potential to improve cross-departmental decisions, harnessing collective intelligence with a positive effect on overall productivity. The results of a PwC study show that 54% of CEOs believe that AI has increased productivity in the workplace.
Teams Are Rallied Around A Shared Vision: Organizational silos often occur when departments adopt an “us vs. them” mentality. This commonly occurs between sales and marketing departments, as they can view themselves as “fighting” for the same prospects. Business leaders can avoid this competitive behavior by leveraging information provided by AI tools. AI can serve as an unbiased and uniting intelligence source, increasing employee confidence in the business strategy and energizing teams to work toward a collective vision.
The Bottom Line
Business leaders who see departmental silos throughout their company shouldn't wait to implement key changes that will bring their teams together. Work to identify areas in which AI could add the most value to operations and collaboration. When integrated successfully, these technologies can lead to noted improvements in business outcomes, customer experience and employee happiness.
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