knowledge-gap-analysis

name	knowledge-gap-analysis
description	Identify missing or weak organizational knowledge by comparing recurring questions, support and incident demand, search failures, process dependency, source coverage, and decision risk against existing trusted content.

Knowledge Gap Analysis

Use when teams repeatedly ask the same questions, cannot find answers, or depend on undocumented specialist memory.

Procedure

1. Define the audiences and decisions or workflows whose missing knowledge creates cost, risk, delay, or inconsistency.
2. Gather evidence from search queries, zero-result searches, support tickets, incidents, onboarding questions, repeated chat requests, process failures, and subject-matter interviews.
3. Map each recurring need to existing content or source systems and classify the gap as missing, stale, hard to find, contradictory, overly broad, or inaccessible.
4. Prioritize by frequency, consequence, time lost, decision risk, and the number of people dependent on the knowledge.
5. Identify whether the correct solution is new documentation, better taxonomy or search, a source-of-truth fix, automation, training, or removal of an unnecessary process.
6. Assign an owner and evidence source for the highest-value gaps.
7. Measure whether new or improved knowledge reduces repeated demand after publication.
8. Revisit the gap list as products, teams, and support patterns change.

Decision rules

• Not every repeated question needs a new article; sometimes the existing answer is simply undiscoverable.
• High-frequency low-consequence gaps and rare high-consequence gaps both deserve attention for different reasons.
• Documenting a broken process can preserve the problem instead of solving it.
• Use demand evidence rather than brainstorming a knowledge backlog in isolation.

Quality gate

The analysis is ready when gaps trace to real demand or risk, existing content and discoverability have been checked, priority reflects consequence and frequency, each major gap has the right type of intervention and owner, and the impact of filling it can be observed afterward.