The Governance Audit

A governance audit is a structured diagnostic of a knowledge governance system. It answers: where is the governance working? Where has it broken down? What are the highest-risk gaps? The ATLAS governance audit framework covers six dimensions and produces a scored report that drives remediation prioritization.

The audit is the mechanism for discovering problems that the governance system itself cannot see: ungoverned domains, systematically wrong content, ownership gaps that existed before the current system was designed. Run it when a knowledge base is acquired (through a merger, team consolidation, or platform migration), when governance health metrics degrade across multiple domains simultaneously, and annually as a standard health check.

1. Dimension 1: Ownership Coverage Does every content item have a named owner? Does every domain have a named steward with a named successor? Score: (items with named owners / total items) × (domains with named stewards / total domains). A score below 85% on either metric indicates systematic ownership gaps. Remediation: assign stewards to ungoverned domains before any content accuracy work — unowned domains cannot be maintained.
2. Dimension 2: Review Currency What percentage of content is current (within its review SLA)? Score by content type: runbooks, articles, FAQs, decision records separately. A knowledge base where 40% of runbooks are overdue has a different problem than one where 40% of decision records are overdue. The former is operationally dangerous; the latter is archivally incomplete. Weight scores by content type consequence.
3. Dimension 3: Schema Compliance What percentage of content has all required schema fields populated? Spot-check 20% of items in each domain for completeness of critical fields: summary, trigger condition (runbooks), question phrasing (FAQs). Schema non-compliance is a leading indicator of future retrieval failure — it surfaces before users report problems but predicts them.
4. Dimension 4: Taxonomy Integrity Is the taxonomy consistent and coherent? Check for: orphan content in catch-all categories, near-duplicate category names, facet values that do not match the controlled vocabulary, and categories with no items or one item. Taxonomy integrity degrades gradually; the audit surfaces the accumulated drift.
5. Dimension 5: Retrieval Quality Does the knowledge base return useful results for real user queries? Pull 20 queries from actual user search logs or Slack question history. Run them against the knowledge base. Score: top result relevance (1–5), whether the answer is complete (yes/no), whether the content is current (yes/no). A knowledge base with good coverage but poor retrieval quality is failing users just as effectively as one with content gaps.
6. Dimension 6: Governance Process Compliance Is the governance process being followed? Sample 20 recently published items: were they reviewed before publication? Do they have a complete review history? Are cross-domain items assigned to a lead steward? Process compliance indicates whether governance is real or performative. A knowledge base with a documented governance process that is ignored in practice has governance theater, not governance.

# Governance audit report — Ryan Consulting Knowledge Base
# Audit date: 2026-03-01
# Auditor: ATLAS / Knowledge Admin

audit_scores:
  ownership_coverage:
    items_with_owner: 94%
    domains_with_steward: 85%        # 2 of 13 domains ungoverned
    score: 89%
    status: yellow
    finding: "Client Success and Partnerships domains have no active steward."
    remediation: "Assign stewards within 2 weeks. Escalate to domain team leads."

  review_currency:
    runbooks_current: 71%            # 90-day SLA
    articles_current: 88%            # 180-day SLA
    faqs_current: 68%                # 90-day SLA
    decision_records_current: 91%   # 365-day SLA
    score: 79%
    status: yellow
    finding: "FAQ and runbook currency below target. Engineering runbooks particularly overdue."
    remediation: "Block 2-week review sprint for Engineering domain. Steward to prioritize."

  schema_compliance:
    items_with_summary: 91%
    runbooks_with_trigger: 78%       # Below target
    faqs_with_proper_question: 85%
    score: 85%
    status: yellow
    finding: "22% of runbooks missing trigger condition. High retrieval impact."
    remediation: "Trigger condition backfill required. Assign to contributors as maintenance sprint."

  taxonomy_integrity:
    orphan_content_in_catchall: 4%
    near_duplicate_categories: 3 pairs found
    invalid_facet_values: 12 items
    score: 87%
    status: green
    finding: "Minor drift. 3 near-duplicate category pairs need review."
    remediation: "Taxonomy owner to resolve category pairs in next monthly review."

  retrieval_quality:
    queries_tested: 20
    top_result_relevant: 75%
    answer_complete: 70%
    content_current: 78%
    score: 74%
    status: red
    finding: "Retrieval quality below acceptable threshold. Linked to schema compliance gaps."
    remediation: "Trigger condition backfill will directly improve runbook retrieval. Priority."

  governance_process_compliance:
    items_reviewed_before_publish: 88%
    review_history_complete: 92%
    cross_domain_items_with_lead: 91%
    score: 90%
    status: green
    finding: "Process compliance strong. 12% publishing without review — investigate."

overall_score: 84%
overall_status: yellow
priority_remediations:
  1: "Assign stewards to ungoverned domains (Client Success, Partnerships)"
  2: "Trigger condition backfill sprint for runbooks"
  3: "FAQ review sprint — 32% overdue"