Knowledge silos and “key person risk” in IT

TL;DR

• Knowledge silos and key person risk leave IT teams exposed.
• Lost expertise causes outages, delays, and security gaps.
• Legacy systems and poor documentation make it worse.
• Share knowledge, rotate roles, and reward collaboration.
• Fix it before a crisis hits.

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What are knowledge silos and key person risk?

Let’s start with the uncomfortable truth: in most IT organizations, there are a handful of people who hold the keys to the kingdom—sometimes quite literally. Maybe it’s the only engineer who knows how to reset the ancient payroll system, or the architect who can actually untangle the cloud spaghetti when something breaks at 2 a.m. Even in teams that pride themselves on open culture, tribal knowledge accumulates faster than anyone likes to admit. This isn’t just a human quirk; it’s a structural risk, hiding in plain sight.

Knowledge silos happen when critical experience, context, and “how things really work” information gets trapped—sometimes intentionally, often by accident—within certain individuals or cliques. The rest of the team? They might get the sanitized SOP or wiki page, if they’re lucky. But when things go sideways, everyone still ends up on Slack, hoping that one person joins the call.

“Key person risk” is the next step in this dance. It’s what happens when a team, a whole project, or even an entire business process depends on the presence (and goodwill) of one specialist. If that person is out sick, takes a new job, or just tunes out, you don’t just lose a pair of hands—you lose the map, the compass, and sometimes the memory of where the gold is buried.

If you think this sounds dramatic, look at the numbers: 44% of organizations now say knowledge silos are the single biggest challenge in knowledge management (CAKE.com, 2025). Meanwhile, 63% of CIOs flagged “key person risk” as their top operational threat, beating out even ransomware and cloud outages (Gartner, 2024).

These aren’t just theoretical risks. Every seasoned IT leader has a story: the system that no one could patch because the only person who understood it left, the business process that ground to a halt when “Bob” went on vacation, or the time someone discovered that the “disaster recovery” plan existed only in someone’s head.

Why do silos and KPR persist, even in technically sophisticated organizations? The reasons are rarely malicious. Sometimes it’s comfort—people like to stick with what they know. Sometimes it’s the pace—when you’re firefighting daily, who has time to write the playbook? And sometimes, let’s be honest, it’s about job security. When you’re the only one who can fix the thing, you’re less likely to be made redundant. But more often, it’s just the way work gets done: informally, through conversations, quick fixes, undocumented scripts, and a handful of bookmarks in someone’s browser.

Of course, this isn’t just a technical issue; it’s a psychological one. For the “key person,” there’s pride and pressure. You’re the hero when things break, but you’re also the single point of failure no one talks about in public. For the rest of the team, there’s dependence—and resentment. It’s not a healthy dynamic. It breeds bottlenecks, burnout, and a quiet sense of dread every time someone updates their LinkedIn profile.

In the current era—where hybrid work, turnover, and relentless change are the norm—this risk is only getting sharper. As more organizations chase agility, digital transformation, and AI initiatives, the cost of losing key knowledge at the wrong moment climbs. And it’s not just about operations: when knowledge leaves, so does the capacity to adapt, innovate, and recover from mistakes.

So if you’re tempted to think, “We have documentation, we’re safe,” it’s worth asking: if two people left tomorrow, would your team be able to keep the lights on? Would you even know what you’d lost until things started breaking? The difference between a resilient, learning-focused IT culture and a brittle, hero-dependent one is rarely obvious—until it’s too late.

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Why it matters now

Unplanned downtime, unwritten costs

Let’s get specific: when knowledge is siloed or a “key person” walks, the pain isn’t abstract. It shows up on the balance sheet, the incident logs, and in the faces of tired teams scrambling to recover. In 2024, 36% of major IT incidents—think outages, failed deployments, security scares—were traced directly to missing or inaccessible “tribal knowledge” (Palo Alto Networks: Unit 42, 2025). Not process failures, not new technology, but simply not knowing who knows what, or how to do what needs to be done.

There’s a reason for the growing anxiety at the top: 72% of CIOs say that losing just one key technologist would mean at least a month of lost productivity, and often much more (Gartner, 2024). These aren’t just “hard to replace” folks—they’re irreplaceable in the short term, because their know-how isn’t written down, shared, or even fully understood until it’s missing.

More than just lost time

It’s not just about plugging a gap or hiring a replacement. When a key person leaves, you lose the context behind thousands of micro-decisions, workarounds, and “gotchas” that never made it into the official documentation. This often triggers a domino effect:

• Projects stall or are abandoned midstream
• Incident response slows down or fails outright (“Who knows where the backup scripts are?”)
• Teams spend weeks reconstructing dependencies, only to discover critical gaps too late

And the consequences aren’t limited to operations. In McKinsey’s 2025 survey, organizations with high key person risk were 67% less likely to hit their digital transformation goals on schedule (McKinsey, 2025). When the person who knows how the old system talks to the new platform leaves, the roadmap doesn’t just slow down—it sometimes stops dead.

The silent vulnerabilities

Security teams feel the risk even more acutely. Siloed knowledge means missed vulnerabilities, inconsistent patching, and a lack of shared awareness about how systems actually behave under stress. In the aftermath of several high-profile breaches, postmortems found that siloed expertise—sometimes as simple as “nobody else knew the firewall rules”—was a root cause (Palo Alto Networks: Unit 42, 2025). Regulators are starting to notice too, with new compliance regimes demanding not just process, but evidence of distributed, documented knowledge.

The human toll

There’s another cost: morale. When teams are forced to depend on a single hero (or scapegoat), it breeds frustration, disengagement, and eventually, attrition. High performers burn out because they can’t take a real vacation. Others check out, feeling powerless to contribute or learn. The organization loses not just capability, but the trust and psychological safety that allow teams to adapt and improve.

How silos and key person risk take root

Knowledge silos and key person risk don’t show up overnight. They creep in, almost invisibly, woven into the day-to-day fabric of IT work. If you’re looking for a single villain, you won’t find one—this is a systems problem, not a personality flaw. Still, there are a few all-too-common ways these risks take hold, even in teams that think they’re immune.

The “Museum Exhibit” problem

Let’s start with legacy tech. Over 62% of global enterprises still run mission-critical workloads on mainframes or bespoke legacy systems (McKinsey, 2025). These aren’t just old—they’re idiosyncratic, hacky, sometimes undocumented, and often completely opaque to anyone except the one or two engineers who’ve kept them running since the Clinton administration.

Every time a business postpones modernization “just one more quarter,” the expertise gets narrower and more fragile. It’s not uncommon to find systems where even basic changes require tracking down a semi-retired consultant or the engineer who built it in the first place. The longer these systems stick around, the deeper the silo becomes.

The “Over-the-Shoulder” trap

In theory, knowledge should flow through wikis, code comments, and robust documentation. In reality? 56% of IT knowledge is shared via informal, ad hoc conversations rather than documented systems (Helpjuice, 2024). People learn from hallway chats, Slack DMs, or by watching over someone’s shoulder. It works—until the person with the answers isn’t there, or the team goes remote, and suddenly the “tribal” part of tribal knowledge becomes literal.

This isn’t just laziness. IT moves fast. Teams firefight. Documentation is always “tomorrow’s problem.” And there’s a subtle psychological barrier: when your value is tied to what you know, sharing everything can feel risky—even if no one says it out loud.

The revolving door

IT has always been a high-churn field, but remote work and industry-wide demand have turned that up to eleven. People leave for better offers, new challenges, or plain old burnout. When they go, the knowledge gap they leave behind is rarely obvious until a crisis hits. The CompTIA IT Industry Outlook 2025 highlights how rapid turnover and distributed teams make it even harder to keep expertise spread evenly (CompTIA, 2025).

Worse, in remote or hybrid setups, onboarding new staff is trickier. The casual “let me show you” moments vanish, and even when documentation exists, it’s often out of date or missing the nuances that only surface through experience.

“Too busy to share”

Modern IT teams are under constant pressure: maintain uptime, deliver features, manage security, and roll out the next transformation initiative. With deadlines looming, sharing knowledge is the first thing sacrificed. The attitude becomes: “Just let me fix it now, we’ll document later.” Except later rarely comes.

Power, protection, and psychological safety

There’s another layer—one nobody likes to talk about. When someone is the only person who can solve certain problems, they gain informal power. For some, it’s job security; for others, it’s just easier to do it themselves than to slow down and teach. Meanwhile, junior team members might hesitate to ask questions, afraid of looking incompetent or stepping on toes. Without a culture of psychological safety, it’s easier to let the silo persist.

Organizational blind spots

Finally, many orgs simply don’t measure or track knowledge risk. If you don’t map out who knows what (and who doesn’t), you’ll only realize the gap when it turns into a crisis. Succession planning is often reserved for the C-suite, not the person who knows how to recover the customer database at 3 a.m.

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Best practices and contrasting views

There’s no silver bullet for eliminating knowledge silos or key person risk, but some approaches consistently move the needle. The most resilient IT teams treat knowledge sharing like disaster recovery: not optional, not “someday,” but a core part of daily work.

What works?

• Modern knowledge platforms: Adoption of purpose-built tools for documentation and search is up 38% in just the past year (Helpjuice, 2024). Many organizations are layering in GenAI to capture and organize expertise on the fly (CAKE.com, 2025).
• Cross-training and rotation: Teams with structured cross-training see up to 41% less key person risk. Job shadowing, “bus factor” dashboards, and rotating on-call duties help spread know-how before a crisis arrives.
• Succession and reward systems: Only 27% of IT orgs have formal succession plans for all critical roles (Gartner, 2024). The best teams reward documentation and mentoring, not just firefighting.

Some argue that too much process and forced documentation can slow teams or stifle agility (see MIT Sloan, 2023). The sweet spot? Build systems and culture that make sharing easy—but leave room for informal, organic transfer. Pragmatism beats perfection.

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Action steps for IT leaders

1. Map Your Risk
2. Identify the “bus factor” on every critical system—who knows what, and where are the single points of failure? Don’t guess; make it visible.
3. Bake Sharing into the Workflow
4. Make documentation, code reviews, and peer shadowing part of the sprint—not a side project. Tie these to performance goals and team recognition.
5. Rotate Key Roles
6. Regularly switch up who is on-call, who deploys, and who maintains “that system.” Cross-training isn’t a luxury—it’s insurance.
7. Reward the Right Behavior
8. Recognize (and incentivize) people who share, mentor, and document. Publicly celebrate not just “hero saves,” but those who help the team stand on their own.
9. Use the Right Tools
10. Invest in easy-to-search, AI-powered knowledge management platforms that people will actually use. Make sharing the path of least resistance.
11. Review and Update Often
12. Schedule regular “knowledge risk” reviews—at least quarterly. When priorities shift or people move, update your risk map and plans.

Don’t wait for a crisis. Make these steps routine, and your team won’t just survive the next surprise—they’ll adapt and thrive.

Knowledge silos and key person risk aren’t just technical headaches—they’re organizational blind spots that quietly undermine resilience, innovation, and team morale. The real cost shows up when the wrong person leaves, or when a routine issue turns into a crisis because "only one person knows how." By making knowledge sharing, cross-training, and risk mapping part of everyday IT leadership—not just an afterthought—you turn vulnerability into strength. In a world where change is constant, the smartest teams are the ones that share what they know and build capacity together. Don’t wait for the next outage to expose your blind spots. Start closing the gaps now, and your team will be ready for whatever comes next.

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FAQ

1. What is a knowledge silo and why is it risky for IT organizations?

A knowledge silo forms when information or expertise is confined to one person or team, making the organization vulnerable if that person leaves or is unavailable. This creates a “key person risk” where critical operations, support, or innovation grind to a halt.

2. What are the main causes of knowledge silos and key person risk in IT?

Legacy systems, informal knowledge sharing, lack of documentation, high staff turnover, and a culture that rewards “heroes” rather than team learning are the leading causes.

3. How can IT leaders identify if they have a key person risk?

Review critical systems and processes to see if only one or two people hold the essential knowledge. Conduct “bus factor” assessments and ask, “If this person left tomorrow, what would break and who could fix it?”

4. What are the best ways to prevent or break knowledge silos in IT?

Make documentation and knowledge sharing part of regular workflow, rotate responsibilities, use modern knowledge management tools, encourage peer learning, and reward people for sharing what they know.

5. Can too much documentation or process slow down IT teams?

Yes. While documenting and sharing knowledge reduces risk, too much process can slow teams and stifle agility. The best results come from balancing essential structure with informal, everyday sharing.

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