Digital Impact was created by the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford PACS and was managed until 2024. It is no longer being updated.
January 29, 2014
Healthcare data is a perennial topic of interest, if only for the polemics that accompany healthcare policy. Surrounding the discussion is an implicit and explicit data infrastructure that determines who owns which data and how it flows between discrete entities and healthcare systems. We caught up with Jody Madala founder of Madala Health, in the […]
January 28, 2014
Each year the Minnesota Council on Foundations (MCF) describes state philanthropy trends in its Giving in Minnesota research report. To produce Giving in Minnesota, 2013 Edition, MCF codes, analyzes and reports on more than 27,575 grants of $2,000 or more awarded by 100 of Minnesota’s largest grantmakers. The grants coded for MCF’s research totaled $1.16 […]
January 27, 2014
There’s a good bit of (proper) railing against silos, but have we considered why they’re sometimes so comfortable? They serve an isolated efficiency in a functional area and the positive results of “business as usual” can lull an organization away from innovating when narrow but visible goals are met. Adding to that, there’s another, often […]
January 22, 2014
The “cause-related” silo is a common phenomenon in many companies: the social impact activities are less integrated into the business and each business unit goes about its own way of doing “good.” This isolation can be effective for specific projects, but won’t match the weight of the business impact of the larger enterprise. Oktay Dogramaci, Head […]
January 15, 2014
Christian Buckley, Founder & CEO of CollabTalk, argues for a better infrastructure when it comes to creating our own data management solutions – starting with the way we think. Siloed thinking, by definition, creates gaps in our ability to identify and solve the right problems based on consideration of the whole enterprise, the bigger picture. […]
January 14, 2014
We continue our theme this month as an attempt to deconstruct (and reconstruct) the concept of silos – discretely managed stores of data. The standard sentiment is to tear them down, but is it possible that we actually need them in a certain form, the real “problem” being the determination of what information should flow […]
January 9, 2014
New compendium of blog posts from Markets For Good captures discussion and debate around how to strengthen the “information infrastructure” of the social sector: “Selected Readings: Making Sense of Data and Information in the Social Sector.” Going forward, you can access this publication, in downloadable e-book format, directly from our homepage. (See the top right […]
January 8, 2014
This entry is one of a series of posts we will publish from the winners of the MFG Challenge: Increasing Interoperability of Data for Social Good. Read on for a sharp, prescriptive take on the silo phenomenon. …
January 7, 2014
We’re now far along into the narrative on how data will “change the way we live and work.” Further, that narrative is beginning to develop into more than an abstract promise, as we see examples and case studies chronicled regularly in such sources as The Harvard Business Review and the Stanford Social Innovation Review. But, […]
January 6, 2014
This month marks the launch of our first reader-proposed theme, Beyond Data Silos, suggested by Andrew Means, founder of Data Analysts For Social Good. In his winning submission, Andrew raised interesting questions about how we think about data silos and, implicitly, about our framework for addressing them. He noted data silos as inefficiencies, for sure, […]
