What Severance teaches us about data, siloes and transformation
"The drama depicts the nature of modern business data management and operations."
Apple TV’s Severance might be a fictional portrayal of a dark office dystopia, but amongst the drama on screen lies some deep similarities with the challenges that UK businesses face with siloed operating environments, cross-department transformation and data-driven insights.
These are not superficial operational issues either. They are indicative of the UK’s struggles with growth and prosperity. We are facing a recession risk after years of persistent low productivity and output. But there’s no questioning our collective determination to end this trend; our recent study of high-growth UK organisations found that growth was the unanimous business goal.
For all these positive intentions, though, business siloes between departments were ranked in our survey as the number one barrier to achieving this objective. A lack of quality data to inform planning and decision-making was also named as a big barrier to growth. In Severance, this scenario is an undercurrent to the workings of the Macrodata Refinement (MDR) team. It causes confusion, obscurity and ultimately, unrest because the team sits isolated from the wider business, unable to comprehend or efficiently achieve its goals.
Taken at face value, the drama depicts an almost whimsical caricature of certain workplace interactions, but underneath there’s some striking similarities with the nature of modern business data management and operations.
An unexpected mirror to workplace data challenges
In our survey of the UK’s high-growth businesses, more than 9-in-10 said that improving operational processes is an organisational priority over the next 12 months. And, reaching this objective, requires overcoming issues with system integrations, communication between departments, like IT and sales, legacy and inefficient tech stacks, and low quality data.
In the show, we are reminded throughout that the MDR team must work cohesively and effectively to reach its goal. But just as the team operates in isolation with legacy tools and processes, UK organisations struggle with siloed operations and a lack of integration and communication which restricts data-sharing. In turn, this inhibits growth and progress, and the ability to adopt and embrace new and exciting technologies.
Often, data sits trapped in disparate applications and tools, ungoverned and unstructured, unable to accurately train AI models or inform its outputs. In this context, AI can exacerbate existing issues with data management. It’s mission-critical that organisations break this mould and upgrade their tech infrastructure to connect the dots, otherwise crucial insights go amiss, and growth becomes compromised.
Flying blind towards a goal
In Severance, we see the MDR team using legacy technology to analyse unstructured data, attempt to discover meaning and sort through it without truly understanding its context or purpose. They are in effect, flying blind, working with the data before them, but with no clarity, logic or trust.
This takeaway will feel familiar to business leaders and technologists across the UK who too struggle to apply context, rationale and meaning to their data. Many find themselves in a situation where they are working with multiple data lakes, storage for large volumes of both structured and unstructured data, with duplications and little insight into how data was generated, when or where it resides within the business and what it means.
This environment leads to a ‘data swamp’ that is near impossible to analyse or trust, and this hampers decision-making and ultimately the organisation working as one towards an objective. For highly regulated industries, in particular, this poses an even greater challenge, where data governance is critical for regulatory compliance and stricter customer protections. UK organisations need to appropriately unify and govern their data, leaving context intact, so it can be used to power transformation for leaders who can operate with the peace-of-mind that each decision they take is grounded in trusted insights.
Autonomy unlocks innovation and progress
For many businesses, AI is viewed as a means of generating different routes to growth. This is a mindset that runs right from the UK government down to the newest start-up, so it’s of little surprise to see that 92% of UK high-growth organisations rank the adoption of AI applications as a medium-high priority given the importance placed on securing long term growth. But too much focus on outcomes, rather than building the right data platform to inform its safe and sustainable development, can lead to further issues down the line.
To ensure this doesn’t happen, employees need to be empowered to build AI into their workstreams, understand its relationship with data input and training, and drive innovation scenarios themselves. In Severance, we see MDR lack autonomy to establish their own processes, while there’s little to no transparency, so it all falls apart. Autonomy is key but that doesn’t come without its own risk, so it must be accompanied by the right stewardship. AI can easily compound existing data challenges unless the right foundations are in place first.
UK organisations need to unite and govern their data, and bring in third-party sources, so they have a single, reliable source of truth for all insights that will inform growth and progress. With complete transparency, leaders can have full business context to make more impactful decisions. This ultimately leads to better productivity, faster go to market times and higher chances of achieving growth objectives. This is the escape route, for those that can’t see through the data obscurity - not too unlike Severance’s MDR team.
Georgia Tangalakie is Head of BTP at SAP UKI
