Above is a screen capture of an internal Kyield document that displays an illustration of the high costs of data silos to individual organizations, regions, and society based on actual cases we have studied; in some case based on public information and in others private, confidential information. This is intended for a slide-show type of presentation so does not go into great detail. Suffice to say that human suffering, lives lost–human and otherwise, and wars that could have been prevented that were not are inseparably intertwined with economics and ecology, which is why I have viewed this issue for 15 years as one ultimately of sustainability, particularly when considering the obstacles of silos to scientific discovery, innovation, and learning as well as crisis prevention.

 
Mark Montgomery
Founder & CEO
Kyield
http://www.kyield.com

4 thoughts on “Unacceptably High Costs of Data Silos

  1. Mark, I certainly agree with your conclusions about the problems with data silos.

    However, the logic of your graphic is not intuitively obvious??? Perhaps you could explain underlying rationale of how you calculated your numbers, or at least some of them. V

  2. Hi Vince,

    What is intuitively obvious to one is not to another and V/V. To me it says precisely what I want.

    Yes, unfortunately if we provided the detail desired, all we would accomplish is to educate our competition on our 15 years of investment in R&D, which we’ve done quite enough– one of the enormous disincentives that we cover in our work — stealing of original work and lack of meritocracy, misaligned compensation plans, lack of accountability– all within the well known “inefficiencies” that are exploited quite intentionally with massive resources.

    That said, you’ll find that I offer more than most, including the business case on Katrina that led to the first national knowledge system on the U.S. WH agenda — along with a few others we share on our web site under learning center.

    The low hanging fruit that are public in recent times — 9/11 and the now famous FBI memo warning of just such an attack from a senior analyst who was an expert, following several of the terrorists at flight school, and if shared with the appropriate people in other agencies would have very likely prevented the entire crisis and all that followed. Tracing the costs is not difficult. Precise influence on later events is a matter of forecasting, but it is public knowledge (Greenspan’s autobiography) that the loose FRB policy following not only “saved the economy” in the short term, but also fed the housing bubble. It’s also true that quite a number of credible researchers produced data highlighting the inability of borrowers to pay mortgages– I warned many times as did others, but the data was conveniently ignored, which is why automation is necessary as humans, units, orgs, and sometimes entire industries will stampede right off the cliff.

    Preventing the next Fort Hood tragedy, by design
    http://kyield.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/preventing-the-next-fort-hood-tragedy-by-design/

    Hidden costs of complexity in the enterprise
    http://kyield.wordpress.com/2010/04/07/hidden-costs-of-complexity-in-the-enterprise/

    Clear Choice: Semantic Structure or Systemic Crises
    http://kyield.wordpress.com/2010/06/10/clear-choice-semantic-structure-or-systemic-crises/

    Toyota’s Failure to act on the Dots
    http://kyield.wordpress.com/2010/02/28/toyota%E2%80%99s-failure-to-act-on-the-dots/

    Our learning center
    http://www.kyield.com/learningcenter.html

    The Diabetes use case scenario might be of interest if you haven’t consumed yet– almost every leading institution in HC worldwide has.

    I have a long list, but they are unfortunately proprietary, as are the specific solutions. Thanks for you interest — Mark

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