> "Keeping the docs current is everybody's responsibility and nobody's KPI." ^pain A collective maintenance pain where tagging, linking, weekly reviews, and broken-link fixes are invisible non-billable work. It competes with shippable output and is never finished. When the implicit maintainer leaves or moves on, the maintenance simply stops — but nobody notices until things break. ## Discovery questions - "Who in your org actually owns keeping your internal docs current? Is that in their job description?" - "If your documentation maintainer left tomorrow, what would happen to the docs in six months?" ^discovery-questions ## Examples - Forrester's "Right Way to Do Knowledge Management" highlights a financial-services firm where customer-service KB articles went stale because upkeep was not in anyone's performance objectives.[^1] - GAO on federal IT acquisitions: documentation and lessons-learned repositories are underused and outdated when KM roles are not assigned.[^2] - IEEE Software on technical debt in documentation: a telecom's unmaintained architecture docs caused a production incident because engineers relied on outdated diagrams.[^3] - O'Reilly DevOps case study at a global retailer: incident reviews cite "documentation rot" as a contributor; documentation maintenance was not in any team's KPIs.[^4] [^1]: https://www.forrester.com/report/the-right-way-to-do-knowledge-management/RES176801 [^2]: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-17-142 [^3]: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7985660 [^4]: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/accelerate/9781457191435