Building Documentation That Actually Helps Your Team Work Better
- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
Written by Alberto Zuin, CTO/CIO
Alberto Zuin is a CTO/CIO and the founder of MOYD, helping startup teams master their tech domain. With 25+ years of leadership in software and digital strategy, he blends enterprise architecture, cybersecurity, and AI know-how to guide fast-growing companies.
Every organisation says it has documentation. But what most teams actually have is a growing digital graveyard: scattered files in shared drives, half-written process guides in random wikis, informal decisions buried in Slack threads, and tribal knowledge trapped in people’s heads.
Good documentation isn’t about more storage, it’s about making the right knowledge available where and when people need it and ensuring it’s trustworthy, current, and actionable. That’s a harder problem than most leaders admit, and it’s precisely why knowledge management and enterprise documentation systems have evolved so rapidly over the past decade.
What modern documentation and knowledge management tools are doing
At their core, knowledge management systems aim to capture, organise, and make usable an organisation’s collective intelligence. In traditional setups, these systems were essentially internal repositories: wikis, shared document libraries, and searchable FAQs. They helped centralise reference material, so teams didn’t have to chase down individual contributors for answers.
As organisations grew more distributed and data more fragmented, two trends reshaped the market:
The sheer volume of unstructured data - documents, conversations, attachments, and code comments became impossible to wrangle manually without tooling.
Expectations for real-time answers have shifted from “desktop search” to “contextual discovery” within workflow tools. Modern platforms aim to eliminate the need to know where information lives and instead surface it when and where it’s relevant.
Even so, not all tools are created equal. In broad strokes, there are three categories in the modern landscape:
1. Traditional knowledge bases
These are the familiar places you store documentation. Platforms like Confluence and Document360 provide structured repositories with editing, version control, access control, and search. They work well when you need authoritative, written documentation that lives in one place.
Tools like Notion or Slite blend documentation with lightweight databases and cross-team collaboration.
Traditional knowledge bases are strong at retaining knowledge but weaker at connecting and ensuring ongoing relevance unless teams invest discipline and governance.
2. AI-enhanced search and discovery
This is where platforms like Glean sit. Glean positions itself as an AI-powered workplace search and knowledge discovery system that connects to dozens of internal systems and indexes company content to answer questions in natural language. It uses machine learning to personalise results and contextualise queries across structured and unstructured data sources.
From a user perspective, this can feel like asking an assistant for an answer and getting not just links but relevant excerpts and context. Glean’s approach indexes and surfaces information from wherever it lives, Slack, Google Drive, CRM systems, wikis, and attempts to stitch it into a navigable graph.
However, search-centric tools still assume the knowledge exists somewhere worth indexing and that surface relevance equals true organisational understanding. They help teams find information but don’t inherently ensure that information is correct, owned, current, or structured for long-term utility.
3. Enterprise search + knowledge ecosystems
Lastly, there’s a growing class of systems that combine structured knowledge bases with AI-driven discovery, semantic search, and cross-source integration. These aim to reduce siloing without forcing migration of all content into a single repository. Examples vary widely in focus and depth. Research lists dozens of options with overlapping feature sets.
Where LLMs and AI fit in
Large language models (LLMs) from providers such as OpenAI, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, and Microsoft Copilot have accelerated expectations for workplace knowledge tooling. These models can:
Interpret natural language questions,
Summarise documents,
Link concepts semantically across domains,
And generate draft responses or knowledge entries.
When used well, LLMs serve as a reasoning layer that augments structured systems, but they are not a replacement for governed knowledge assets. They don’t know what you intend your business to mean, they synthesise based on patterns in data (and can hallucinate if content is poorly curated). This distinction matters when relying on them for internal operational decision-making.
Why so many KM projects stall
Here’s the candid reality: most deployments fail not because the technology was incapable, but because the organisation never built the discipline around it.
You can deploy a knowledge base, connect 50 tools to enterprise search, and layer AI on top of it, yet teams still treat it as a glorified file cabinet.
That’s because effective organisational knowledge requires:
Clear ownership and accountability for content.
Governance practices to keep information fresh.
Lifecycle management, so codifying when something should be updated, archived, or deprecated.
Integration with daily workflows so teams don’t have to go look for answers.
Search tools improve accessibility, and knowledge bases improve storage and structure, but neither solves these deeper organisational problems on its own.
Introducing Actora: A different approach
This is where Actora positions itself intentionally as a contrast to both traditional KM platforms and search-centric systems.
Actora is a brand new project in active development, designed around the idea that organisational knowledge isn’t a flat set of documents or a searchable index, but a living ecosystem. Its architecture and intent treat knowledge as an asset with structure, ownership, and reliability.
Here’s what sets it apart in practical terms:
Knowledge as a governed asset
Actora doesn’t just index content, it models and curates it with context and ownership in mind. That means what lives in the system isn’t just retrievable, but it’s trustworthy and actionable.
Semantic linking and meta context
Instead of treating each knowledge artefact as an isolated item, Actora connects them via relationships, dependencies, and business relevance, helping teams reason across information rather than simply retrieve it.
Lifecycle and hygiene built in
Actora emphasises what is current and why it matters. Entries have accountability, review cycles, and signals that show freshness and confidence.
AI as a layer of understanding, not a replacement for quality
AI in Actora doesn’t sit on top of chaos, it enhances curated knowledge, surfaces gaps, and helps teams identify where institutional memory is weak or outdated.
Even in its early stages, the outcome is a system that treats knowledge as a strategic organisational capability, not a problem to be indexed. That’s a crucial shift for teams that want clarity rather than searchability amid noise.
Conclusion
Documentation that “actually helps” isn’t created by dumping files into a bucket and hoping people search intelligently. It’s about shaping organisational practice so that knowledge is:
Accurate and current,
Clear and governed,
Integrated into daily workflows,
Owned and maintained,
And connected in meaningful ways.
Modern tools like enterprise search platforms and AI enhancements clearly raise the bar for discoverability. But they don’t replace the work of ensuring the organisation knows what it knows and how it knows it.
Read more from Alberto Zuin
Alberto Zuin, CTO/CIO
Alberto Zuin is a fractional CTO/CIO and the founder of MOYD, Master of Your (Tech) Domain. With over 25 years of experience in tech leadership, he helps startups and scaleups align their technology with business strategy. His background spans enterprise architecture, cybersecurity, AI, and agile delivery. Alberto holds an MBA in Technology Management and several top-tier certifications, including CGEIT and CISM. Passionate about mentoring founders, he focuses on helping teams build secure, scalable, and purpose-driven digital products.
