A catalog of the pains a knowledge management system can encounter. Each pain is named as a question against a property of the artefact - the answer "no" being the felt cost. Recognition has two failure modes:
- the cost is absorbed as friction (slow onboarding, repeated questions, duplicated decisions) before it is named
- the absence of knowledge has no inventory, because missing things are never listed as missing
The step is complete when the gap is named and its cost is felt - not just acknowledged abstractly. Without this step, methodology and tool decisions are solutions in search of a problem.
^awareness
## The pains
> "Can someone find this without asking a person?"
^discoverability
When the answer is no, every read becomes either a request to a human or a scan of every artefact. The cost scales with the size of the store and the requester's patience, not with the precision of the request - and the humans who hold the index in their heads become bottlenecks the moment they go on leave.
> "Can it stay current without disproportionate effort?"
^maintainability
When the answer is no, artefacts rot faster than anyone refreshes them. Readers get yesterday's answer to today's question; the cost of correcting the drift grows faster than the cost of authoring the original. Eventually no one trusts the artefact and everyone returns to asking a person.
> "Can it link to adjacent knowledge?"
^connectivity
When the answer is no, every artefact stands alone. The reader has to know its relationships out of band - which related concepts exist, what it depends on, what depends on it - and that knowledge lives in someone's head or nowhere. The artefact captures the *what* but not the *where it fits*.
> "If the tool changes, does the knowledge survive?"
^survivability
When the answer is no, every tool migration is a knowledge migration project - some artefacts come over, others get lost, none survive in exactly the same shape. The tool's lifetime becomes the knowledge's lifetime, and the cost of carrying a knowledge base across tools is paid in full every time a vendor pivots or shuts down.
#matt/describe [[DIKW]] vs tools
#move [[Notes management#^problem-storage]] here
> - The problems are clear
> - The tools are available
> - Nobody has shown how to make them work **at scale**
^scale