While keeping people in silos is a good thing for managing and directing them, it tends to be bad for business in the long run. Especially for businesses that rely on innovation for growth.
In the book, The Medici Effect, the author describes how the wealthy 14th century house of Medici created the conditions that led to the Renaissance - a period when there was an explosion of ideas across the arts and sciences. This was only possible because the family's wealth was able to support artists from different disciplines who shared ideas, a lesson to companies that want to innovate.
What's true of people is also true of data. Not all data is created equally. As a result it tends to be put in silos determined by source (transactions, surveys, crm, etc). Different data has different degrees of meaningfulness; transaction data tends to be narrow but very deep (telling you a lot about a very narrow field) whereas survey data tends to be broad but less deep. Combining data with different strengths can uncover new insights. Linking transaction data with survey data can identify broader behavior drivers, these can drive sales and increase customer engagement.
In our mind, silos are bad for data too. They prevent data owners from making new discoveries that arise from merging a customer's data.
Knowledge Leaps de-silos your data, creating a single-customer view. Allowing companies to look at the drivers, interactions and relationships across different types of data, whether its transactions, surveys or CRM data.
