On a Tuesday morning in March, a chief executive asked a question that should have taken thirty seconds to answer: have we ever agreed to a liability cap below one million dollars?
The answer existed. It was written down, signed, filed, and sitting on the shared drive the whole time. Finding it took three days, and not finding it in time cost forty thousand dollars.
Every organization has a version of that Tuesday. The knowledge is real, it survived, and it is spread across a million files in a hundred formats, organized by whoever was closest to the filing cabinet that day. An organization knows more than anyone in it. The hard part is getting at it.
Keyword search fails for a specific, fixable reason
The obvious first fix is to index every word and search it. Type "liability cap," get every document containing "liability" and "cap." This fails, and it fails in ways worth naming precisely, because each failure points at what the real fix has to do.
