In our company’s daily operations, we use a bunch of different software tools. And it can be a real headache. We use Microsoft Office 365 for documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and share drives, plus Zoho for our CRM, invoicing, and task management, plus QuickBooks for our official accounting and payroll, plus a bunch of other tools for our website, cybersecurity, data backups, systems monitoring, you get the idea.
All of the tools are great at what they do, but they are terrible at sharing information with each other, creating serious gaps in visibility, collaboration, and efficiency. These small business information silos waste time, increase errors, and limit how effectively you can grow.
If you’re running a business, chances are you have some version of this problem with your email, CRM, e-commerce, project management, and accounting, Most of us have learned to live with the information silos, but it creates a real problem in business, and with AI creeping into our lives these silos can hold us back from leveraging the true potential of our emerging army of robot helpers.
Why Do All Of Us Do This To Ourselves?
The short answer is that there is no single solution that works well across all the different disciplines we need to cover. Email, CRM, documents, accounting, marketing, task management, and now AI are all complex pieces of software, and we usually find that the best tool for any one of these jobs is a specialized app that is not connected to the rest of our software toolkit.
Old-School Connectors Can Help
Traditional API connectors can help business applications, like your CRM and email, share data and communicate with each other. These connectors are usually built by software pros, but there are some popular platforms like Zapier that create off-the-shelf connectors for a lot of popular tools. Traditional connectors, whether you build them yourself or buy them from a service, can be a solid choice, at least until your business outgrows them.
Consolidation Is Another Option (But Usually Not)
There’s no doubt that having your data spread across fewer tools can help decrease the pain of information silos, but we got to where we are for a good reason. Quickbooks is good at accounting, and Zoho has a good CRM, but I would not consider using Zoho’s accounting software for my business and I cannot afford Microsoft’s CRM, so I’m left with keeping the information in two different places. Do I wish I could consolidate the information? Absolutely. Am I willing to use an inferior tool for my accounting or CRM? Not me.
AI Coming To The Rescue?
There is a lot of buzz right now about how AI is going to help us connect all our software platforms so that they can share information. Maybe it will, but there are reasons to be skeptical. For starters, pretty much every company is trying to build out their own AI toolkit, and they each have their reasons for trying to keep the information generated in their tool walled off from other applications.
My guess is that the AI connectors will start to emerge, and when they do they will be better than the ones we have now. That being said, I would not want to be one of the first companies to try one of these new AI connectors. Let somebody else find the problems that the software engineers missed when they designed the tool.
Okay, Fine. I get it. So now what?
I wish there were a single answer to how to start the process of connecting and consolidating your business applications, but getting your software infrastructure organized in a way that’s scalable, efficient, and effective is not a one-size-fits-all situation. The key is to understand that connecting or consolidating siloed information can be complicated, so it’s best to start building your integration strategy long before the silos become a real problem.
If you want to talk it over, feel free to book a free consultation with me, and we can talk it through.