Confluence and knowledge management: measuring the risk

In short. Confluence tells you what your organisation has written; it does not tell you which know-how rests on a single person. KnowledgeCapital reads your Confluence spaces read-only, attaches each page to the knowledge it describes and shows the critical knowledge with no document at all. It can also publish validated sheets to Confluence, if you tick it.

Confluence is an excellent wiki. It never claimed to be anything else. It stores pages, versions them, comments on them, links them to Jira. Thousands of organisations keep their documentation there and are right to do so. The question asked here is a different one: among those thousands of pages, which ones describe know-how you are about to lose?

The three questions a wiki cannot settle

Who holds this know-how, and how many of them are there? A Confluence page has an author. That is not the same as a holder: the author wrote it, they do not necessarily practise it. Knowing that three people master an operation, or only one, changes every decision — and that information is written nowhere in a wiki.

Is that know-how critical, or merely documented? A wiki treats every page the same way. Yet a room-booking procedure and the settings of a heat-treatment furnace do not carry the same value: one is relearned in ten minutes, the other took fifteen years. Without a measurement, the second drowns among the other three thousand.

What is written nowhere at all? That is the most useful question, and a wiki cannot answer it: it only knows what was put into it. Dangerous know-how is precisely the one no page mentions — and which only appears when you ask who knows what, person by person.

What KnowledgeCapital adds — without replacing anything

KnowledgeCapital is not a wiki and does not try to become one. It measures. To every knowledge item in your organisation it assigns a criticality, computed from its vulnerability (how many people hold it, at what level, and who is leaving when) and its relevance to your processes. The result is a map: what is green can wait, what is red cannot.

Once your Confluence is connected, every page read can be attached to a measured knowledge item. The screen then answers the question that really matters, and that no wiki ever asks: which critical knowledge items have no reference document at all?

How the connection is actually made

Connecting takes an address and a token, and a few minutes. Confluence Cloud and Confluence Server / Data Center are recognised automatically from the address you paste.

• You paste the address of one page of your Confluence, your Atlassian email and a read API token.
• The system checks the connection and shows the spaces that account can read: you tick the ones you care about.
• Pages are read, then re-read at the frequency you choose; an unchanged page is never read twice.
• The system proposes page ↔ knowledge attachments; your knowledge manager confirms them. Nothing is set automatically.

And the other way round: what is validated returns to Confluence

An experience-feedback sheet validated by a committee can be published in the Confluence space of your choice, with its provenance and validation date, and updated at each new validation. Your teams keep working where their habits are; validation and measurement live here.

Should you replace Confluence?

No, and we advise against it. Migrating a wiki is expensive, upsets teams and answers none of the three questions above. Keep Confluence for what it does well — writing and finding — and add on top of it the risk measurement, the holders, and the handover plan.

Read next: Retirement: stop losing know-how.

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See also: Wiki, document management or knowledge management? · Mapping critical knowledge: the method · SharePoint and knowledge management: the connector · Knowledge management system: a 12-point evaluation grid · Knowledge management software: how to choose · Intranet knowledge management: map knowledge, no migration

Confluence, Atlassian and Jira are registered trademarks of Atlassian Pty Ltd. KnowledgeCapital is neither affiliated with nor endorsed by Atlassian.