Knowledge coverage

Knowledge coverage is the measured state of what an organisation actually knows about its critical work: what has been verified, what needs re-verification, what criteria were never recorded, what is contradictory, what has no owner, and what only one person knows.

Coverage is the inverse of the usual question. Search and knowledge bases ask what exists and where to find it. Coverage asks what is still not known, which is the part that causes a handover, decision, or delivery to fail.

A coverage state attaches to a decision or a piece of critical work, never to a person. The states are verified, needs verification, missing criteria, contradictory, unclear owner, concentrated in one person, and at risk, each with a suggested verifier.

This distinction matters legally as well as commercially. Measuring the state of organisational knowledge is not the same as measuring an employee, and systems capable of monitoring individual behaviour trigger works-council veto rights in several European jurisdictions.