Regardless, Is this a solved problem? What are the common failure modes of knowledge management systems like Confluence in large organizations, and what are some strategies or alternative tools that have successfully combated this? There’s no way that no one has solved this.
Search is the real value though. I never remember where a certain doc is stored. But if I can remember who wrote it or some snippet from it, I can find it. They link to each other well. Another pointer is from Slack; maybe it needs this kind of combo to work well together?
Your experience was the motivation for StackOverflow.
It's goal was to be better at surfacing information than forums and the Usenet.
After seeing some people delete some big docs I wrote, which I think were still good, and changing documentation platforms so many times (usually to platforms with higher friction), my motivation to be a champion for good documentation has waned significantly. I still do write good readme files for my code, and end user docs for its use, but all the other little nice to have stuff I mostly just keep to myself in my own system. I’m sick of the changes, the friction, and people blindly deleting my work out of ignorance.
Now that said, I have yet to actually use a platform with a good search functionality too. If stuff was easier to find, I strongly suspect that documentation would be better maintained, (provided that there is a cultural value around it)
One solution to this is to write structured and testable documentation. Easier said than done, but if your docs get regularly integration/e2e tested against reality, they stand a much better shot at staying up to date. I always recommend moving the docs as close to the development work as possible - ie docs get checked into git alongside the code and make sure tests fail if anything changes.
literally every manager had "documentation accuracy" as a metric for their domain and they were generally good about things like "did you check the wiki?" when asked questions -- which usually led to a "okay, once you find it, add it"
every single company with confluence was a disaster of unreadable garbage. one place got so bad the ops / support had their own "secret server" of internal docs which were mostly links to text files
yamatokaneko•5h ago
I don’t have a clear answer, but I think the future lies in automatic capture + AI search, not manual input + folder systems.
For us, once we started recording all meetings, the voice conversations became searchable. I'm looking forward to the same kind of AI-first approach for written docs too.
NanaAmun•5h ago
shadag•5h ago
shadag•5h ago