97 Things About Ethics Everyone in Data Science Should Know

Chapter 37. Silos Create Problems—Perhaps More Than You Think

Bonnie Holub

Practice Lead, Data Science, Americas, Teradata

In our work preparing to write a book focusing on chief data officer (CDO) career success, my coauthor, Dave Mathias, and I have interviewed chief data officers and chief analytics officers from Fortune 500 companies, and one theme has resounded throughout all of our discussions: silos (data silos and perspective silos) create problems. The ethical risk here is that in ignoring best practices and maintaining obsolete data silos, CDOs put their organizations at risk for unethical, and possibly illegal, behaviors.

From a management perspective, data silos are databases, data warehouses, data lakes, and so forth in which data is stored for one purpose and is not integrated with the rest of the data that an organization owns. As consumers, we run into this all the time. Think about the last time you called a customer service phone number. They may have recognized your phone number, and you may have entered your sixteen-digit account number and made five or six selections in the automated menu, but when you finally get to speak to a human being, they still don’t know who you are or what you are calling about. That kind of problem happens when the incoming call system is not well integrated with the customer account records. Managers bemoan this situation, because ...