An information silo, or a group of such silos, is an insular management system in which one information system or subsystem is incapable of reciprocal operation with others that are, or should be, related. Thus information is not adequately shared but rather remains sequestered within each system or subsystem, figuratively trapped within a container as grain is trapped within a silo: there may be much of it, and it may be stacked quite high and be freely available within those limits, but it has no effect outside them.
Information silos occur whenever a data system is incompatible, or not integrated, with other data systems. This incompatibility may occur in the technical architecture, in the application architecture, or in the data architecture of a data system. Such data silos are proving an obstacle for businesses wishing to use data mining to make productive use of their data. However, since it has been shown that established data-modeling methods are the root cause of the data-integration problem, most data systems are at least incompatible in the data-architecture layer.
