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5EQRG Q7-3 How Do Information Systems Eliminate the Problems of Information Silos? 293
Workgroup Doctor's Physicians and hospitals store Functional applications.
office/ separated data about patients.
medical Unnecessarily duplicate tests
practice and procedures.

Enterprise applications (CRM,
ERP, EAI) on enterprise networks.

Enterprise Hospital Hospital and local drug store
pharmacy have different
prescription data for the same
patient.

Distributed systems using
Web service technologies in
the cloud.

Inter- Inter-agency No silo: Doctors, hospitals,
enterprise prescription pharmacies share patients’
Figure 7-6 application prescription and other data.
Information Silos as Drivers

integration will be difficult. Making the determination will require manual processes and days,
when it should be readily answered in seconds.
This leads to the fourth consequence: inefficiency. When using isolated functional applications,
decisions are made in isolation. As shown in the fourth row of Figure 7-5, Sales and Marketing
decided to redouble its sales effort with IndyMac. However, Accounting knows that IndyMac was
foreclosed by the FDIC and sold to OneWest and has been slow to pay. There are far better prospects
for increased sales attention. Without integration, the left hand of the organization doesn’t know
what the right hand of the organization is doing.
Finally, information silos can result in increased cost for the organization. Duplicated data,
disjointed systems, limited information, and inefficiencies all mean higher costs.

How Do Organizations Solve the Problems of Information Silos?

As defined, an information silo occurs when data is stored in isolated systems. The obvious way to
fix such a silo is to integrate the data into a single database and revise applications (and business
processes) to use that database. If that is not possible or practical, another remedy is to allow the
isolation, but to manage it to avoid problems.
The arrows in Figure 7-6 show this resolution at two levels of organization. First, isolated
data created by workgroup information systems are integrated using enterprise-wide applications.
Second, today, isolated data created by information systems at the enterprise level are being
integrated into inter-enterprise systems using distributed applications (such as PRIDE). These appli-
cations process data in a single cloud database or connect disparate, independent databases so that
those databases appear to be one database. We will discuss inter-enterprise systems further in Q7-7.
For now, to better understand how isolated data problems can be resolved, consider an enter-
prise system at a hospital.

An Enterprise System for Patient Discharge

Figure 7-7 shows some of the hospital departments and a portion of the patient discharge pro-
cess. A doctor initiates the process by issuing a discharge patient order. That order is delivered to
the appropriate nursing staff, who initiates activities at the pharmacy, the patient’s family, and