> "Our knowledge is in Slack, Notion, the wiki, Google Docs, a few README files, and three people's heads — and nobody owns any of it." ^pain A collective fragmentation pain. The artefacts exist but are spread across stores chosen for convenience at the moment of capture, not for retrieval later. To answer a question, the reader must check five places — and may still miss the canonical version. The fragmentation compounds the ownership gap: when an artefact could live in any of five stores, no one is on the hook for any specific one. ## Discovery questions - "When someone in your org has a question, where do they look first — and what's their second, third, fourth fallback?" - "How many systems would a new hire need access to in their first week to read everything they need?" - "Has it ever happened that an answer existed in your org but nobody could find it? Walk me through that." ^discovery-questions ## Examples - CIO.com on SaaS sprawl: enterprises accumulate hundreds of apps (Slack, Box, Google Workspace, Salesforce, niche tools), leaving data fragmented and complicating any single source of truth.[^1] - Atlassian on building a single source of truth: teams previously had information split between Confluence, email, chat, shared drives, so no one knew where to look.[^2] - IBM on system-of-record vs source-of-truth: organisations have multiple systems of record (CRM, HR, finance) forcing people to chase information across stores.[^3] - ThoughtSpot's SSOT guide is motivated by business data scattered across different databases and tools, causing conflicting answers.[^4] [^1]: https://www.cio.com/article/4006428/saas-sprawl-keeps-growing-with-no-end-in-sight.html [^2]: https://www.atlassian.com/work-management/knowledge-sharing/documentation/building-a-single-source-of-truth-ssot-for-your-team [^3]: https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/system-of-record-vs-source-of-truth [^4]: https://www.thoughtspot.com/data-trends/best-practices/single-source-of-truth