The Costly Illusion of the Technical Fix Data silos are often presented as an architecture problem. The proposed remedy is familiar: connect another application, build a larger data lake, introduce a dashboard, or purchase an enterprise platform capable of making every record visible. These investments may be useful, but they rarely address the deeper reason information remains fragmented. In many organizations, the obstacle is not that data cannot be shared. It is that teams have learned, often rationally, that protecting information preserves influence, avoids blame, and helps them meet local targets. The hidden tax appears wherever one team optimizes its own score at the expense of the customer, the operating…