How efficient is information-sharing in your office really?
If your team encounters problems like duplicate work (two people doing the same task unknowingly), scattered information that’s difficult to find, delays or difficulty in collaborative efforts, or members of the staff feeling “left out of the loop,” then your office most certainly has room for improvement. These problems are all symptomatic of a common but entirely fixable problem: information silos.
Let’s take a few minutes to learn about information silos, why they’re bad, and how Xerox tools can help you eliminate them from your workplace.
The Efficiency-Crushing Side Effects on Your Workplace of Unnecessary Information Silos
An “information silo” is any data, media, or documents are “trapped” (or held) by certain teams, individuals, devices, or even poor document handling processes. Essentially, the data exists within your organization, but it’s only available to some people—and inaccessible to others who could benefit form it.
Let’s illustrate how devastating an information silo can be with a realistic example. Imagine a business has a sales team and a customer service team. Suppose that the customer service team had information about recurring issues customers of the business faced, like a certain product doesn’t work as well as it should, or is prone to shipping delays.
Now, over at the sales department, nobody is aware of these problems. The sales team is still aggressively over-promising on the product’s quality, or the speed of shipping, or whatever it may be. Customers buy, run into the same issues, and go straight back to customer service for help. Maybe the sales department is blindsided when customers start leaving bad reviews. Everyone ends up frustrated.
If this information wasn’t stuck in an “information silo” in the customer service department, these issues would have been avoided and everyone (including, critically, the customers) would have been better off.
Xerox Tools Help Share Information With the Right People – and Protect Sensitive Data With Access Controls and More
Our little illustration in the previous section isn’t a far-fetched scenario—it happens all the time when information doesn’t get shared properly inside an organization. Xerox tools like DocuShare Go, a cloud-based platform, allow teams to store, edit, and share documents from any device.
The platform also has a robust system for setting access permissions, meaning that only authorized users can view certain files. Eliminating information silos doesn’t mean that everyone has to have access to everything, but rather that the people who should have access to certain information actually have it.
Xerox also offers the Workflow Central platform, which can help teams automate certain routine tasks, making it more likely that information ends up where it should be. For example, you might scan a document to a predefined cloud folder, automatically notify team members about it via email, or route time sensitive approvals digitally.
Interested in Learning More About How Xerox Can Enhance Team Communication, Transparency, and Collaboration? We’re Here To Show You the Way
If you’d like to learn more about DocuShare Go or Xerox Workflow Central, two great ways of eliminating information silos in your organization, you can check out our previous blog posts about these excellent tools:
- Xerox Workflow Central’s Latest Updates Make This Productivity Platform a Must-Have
- How To Automate Both Digital and Hard Copy Document Organization With Xerox DocuShare Go
To learn more and get in touch with our team of polite experts at Preferred Document Solutions, please feel free to contact us. You may also request a free online quote.
