What Is a Knowledge Silo?

A knowledge silo is a condition in which critical information, expertise, or context is confined to a single person, team, or system and is not accessible to the broader organization. In software engineering, knowledge silos commonly form around specific services, codebases, or infrastructure components that only one developer or a small group understands well enough to maintain. This isolation creates bottlenecks, slows decision-making, and increases the risk of failures when the knowledge holder becomes unavailable.

Knowledge silos are one of the most persistent obstacles to engineering productivity. When information is locked away, other team members cannot contribute effectively to siloed areas, cannot review code with real understanding, and cannot respond to incidents without first locating the one person who holds the context.

According to a McKinsey report, employees spend nearly 20% of their workweek searching for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can answer questions. In engineering teams, this translates directly into delayed pull requests, slower incident response, and extended onboarding periods for new hires. The compounding effect is significant: a silo that takes 30 minutes per day to work around costs a team hundreds of hours per year.

Silos also feed directly into low bus factor scores. When knowledge concentrates around individuals, any single departure threatens project continuity. They often overlap with tribal knowledge problems, where the missing information was never written down in the first place.

Knowledge silos form through natural, often well-intentioned patterns. A developer who built a service from scratch continues to own it because they are the fastest at making changes. A team adopts a specialized tool, and only the person who championed it learns the configuration details. Over time, efficiency in the short term creates fragility in the long term.

Breaking down silos requires both cultural and technical interventions. On the cultural side, teams can establish rotation policies where engineers periodically work outside their primary domain. Code reviews should be assigned to developers who are less familiar with a component, not just the usual experts. Incident postmortems can include a knowledge-sharing step that captures operational insights for future reference.

On the technical side, documentation is necessary but not sufficient on its own. Internal wikis go stale if no one maintains them. A more sustainable approach pairs written documentation with tools that surface context automatically, connecting questions to the relevant code, pull requests, or design documents without requiring manual search.

Teams use a variety of strategies to prevent and dismantle knowledge silos. Shared code ownership models, where no single person "owns" a service permanently, distribute expertise by design. Architecture decision records preserve the reasoning behind technical choices so future developers do not need to guess. Platforms like Glue use AI to index and surface codebase context, making it possible for any team member to find answers without interrupting a colleague. The most effective anti-silo strategy combines process changes with tooling that keeps knowledge accessible and current.

For practical steps on identifying and eliminating silos in your engineering organization, see Knowledge Silos in Engineering.

What causes knowledge silos in software teams?

Silos typically form from specialization without cross-training, lack of documentation habits, high turnover that leaves gaps, and tooling that stores information in places only certain people check. They tend to grow quietly until a departure or incident makes the gap visible.

How can you tell if your team has a knowledge silo problem?

Common indicators include repeated questions directed at the same person, long delays when that person is unavailable, code review bottlenecks on specific repositories, and new hires reporting that they cannot find answers to basic architectural questions without asking someone directly.

What is the difference between a knowledge silo and a team silo?

A knowledge silo refers specifically to information that is inaccessible. A team silo is an organizational pattern where teams work in isolation with limited communication. Team silos often produce knowledge silos, but knowledge silos can also exist within a single team when one member holds all the context for a subsystem.