I don't think the suggestion was to invent this from scratch, there are many OS tools designed for this. (Yarn workspaces, NX, bit, rush.. the list goes on)
We use google drive for our knowledge management. I think this may cover a large percentage of people reading this.
I want to say, we hate Google Drive as a knowledge management solution, it is great as a document store in general, and the tools to create and edit the documents are fine - sheets, docs, etc, all good.
Primarily we use search in google drive to find things, and this has many issues. The document(s) that are found:
- Often not the current source of truth. Either they are outdated or missing information.
- Misleading or wrong. Information in many documents is just plain wrong, with drive everyone in your company can create documents and title them whatever they like, so it's often the case that a search will result in finding documents that are just incorrect.
- Confusing. Often the source of truth is found in multiple documents. You need to piece together multiple searches/documents to find the answer.
- Missing. This is also the case, the actual information you are looking for is not in a doc at all.
- Part of a large document. This can cause issues, as well as people, who do not like to modify large documents, so they often create smaller documents. They do not always link it either.
- Correct. This can happen too! They just find the right document.
Unfortunately, the problems compound one another, people will find a misleading document and spend time to fix it, leading to multiple sources of truth, for the moment. They may also find it and assume it does not exist, so they make a new doc, so it gets worse, now you have 3 docs. It goes on and on.
Some solutions that we have applied:
- Delete - Just delete a document if you find it has incorrect information. I think this is rare, nobody really feels powerful enough to delete another person's document, but it does happen.
- Banner - Type a banner at the top of the doc stating that you think this is not the source of truth. Even better, link the correct doc in that doc. This helps with people who have the wrong document bookmarked or if the wrong doc is higher in the search.
- Use folders - Move documents into folders and have users search in folders instead of search the entire drive.
They are not ideal but might help others who are using docs in this way.