Knowledge management is often associated with breaking down silos, making information easier to find, and helping people across an organization benefit from what others already know.
So why not simply give everyone access to everything?
It's a reasonable question. If the goal is better knowledge sharing, broad access can seem like the obvious answer. Fewer restrictions mean fewer access requests, fewer barriers between departments, and more opportunities for people to discover information that might be useful to their work.
But access alone doesn't create a healthy knowledge environment.
A healthy knowledge environment makes useful information easy to find without making it easy to accidentally destroy. It helps people distinguish authoritative information from drafts, outdated versions, and works in progress. And it gives teams room to collaborate without automatically turning everything they create into organization-wide knowledge.
These questions apply across almost any modern information environment, from Microsoft SharePoint and Teams and Google Workspace to traditional file servers, Confluence, Notion, and similar platforms. The technology varies, but the underlying questions are similar: Who should be able to find something? Who should be able to read it? Who should be able to change it? And when should information created by one team become part of the organization's broader knowledge base?
Ultimately, people need to be able to find and use the knowledge they need — and have reasonable confidence that they found the right thing.
Openness Is Not the Same as Knowledge Sharing
Organizations often have good reasons for wanting information to be more open. When information is locked away in departmental folders, people waste time asking colleagues for documents they can't access, useful information stays trapped within teams, and work gets recreated simply because no one knew it already existed.
Reproducing those same restrictions on a newer platform does little to solve the problem. But the alternative doesn't have to be universal access with universal editing rights.
Several different questions tend to get bundled together when organizations talk about making information "accessible":
- Discoverability: Should people know that the information exists?
- Read access: Should they be able to view and use it?
- Contribution: Should they be able to add information to the space?
- Editing: Should they be able to change, move, rename, or delete existing content?
- Trust: If they find something, how will they know whether it is current and authoritative?
Different questions call for different answers.
A policy, template, research resource, or collection of institutional knowledge might be discoverable and readable by nearly everyone while remaining editable only by the people responsible for maintaining it. Similarly, employees may benefit from knowing that another department has expertise or information about a topic without having access to every working file that department has accumulated.
The important part is making deliberate choices about what should be shared, with whom, and for what purpose.
Organizations Need Messy Places to Work
Real work is messy.
A team working on a strategic plan might have research notes, meeting notes, early outlines, comments from reviewers, several drafts, an old version retained for reference, and eventually an approved plan. The people working on it usually understand the context. They know which draft is current, why another version was abandoned, and that the document called "Strategic Plan FINAL" isn't really the final version.
That's often what collaboration looks like while work is underway.
Trying to force every working space into a perfectly curated knowledge repository creates its own problems. People need places where they can develop ideas, experiment, revise documents, and collaborate without treating every artifact as ready for organization-wide consumption.
The problem begins when there is no meaningful distinction between those working spaces and the broader information environment available to everyone else.
If every draft, duplicate, abandoned idea, meeting note, and outdated document becomes broadly searchable, more information has technically become available. But the organization's knowledge may actually become harder to find.
More content can mean more noise. More search results can make the right information harder to find.
Not Everything That Exists Is Organizational Knowledge
Curation is part of knowledge management because someone has to make choices about what's worth surfacing more broadly. What will other people actually benefit from finding? What is sufficiently complete and trustworthy that they can rely on it? What context do they need to understand it? And who will take responsibility for maintaining it?
Curation can be lightweight. A formal publishing process for every document would create more bureaucracy than value in many organizations. Useful organizational knowledge can still be imperfect, evolving, and maintained over time.
There is a meaningful difference between making information broadly available because it may be useful to others and making it broadly available simply because nobody decided otherwise.
As organizations grow, that difference becomes more important. A small team may navigate its information largely through shared context: people know who created something, which version to use, and whom to ask when they are unsure. At 100, 500, or 1,000 people, much of that context disappears.
The information itself has to do more of the work.
Search Can Turn Content Into Noise
It's tempting to assume that the best enterprise search experience is the one that searches the largest possible collection of information. If useful knowledge might be sitting somewhere in the organization, shouldn't search be able to find it?
Sometimes. But search quality depends on more than how much content gets indexed.
Imagine searching for the organization's current strategic plan and receiving the approved plan alongside three earlier drafts, last year's plan, a presentation discussing proposed changes, meeting notes from the planning process, and a copy someone downloaded and saved somewhere else.
The search engine has done exactly what it was asked to do. It found the words.
Someone still has to figure out which result to trust.
This is where discoverability and findability begin to diverge. Making more information discoverable gives people access to a larger universe of potential answers. But when useful material is surrounded by duplicates, outdated documents, drafts, and content never intended for a broader audience, finding the right information becomes harder.
Better search technology can improve ranking, relevance, and context. It works best when the information environment provides clear signals about what's current, authoritative, and useful.
Curation helps create those signals: this is current; this is authoritative; this is intended for broader use; this has an owner; this is still worth finding.
Opening more repositories to search without those signals may increase the volume of available information without meaningfully improving access to knowledge.
The goal is to help people find the information they need — and recognize it when they do.
AI Makes an Old Problem More Visible
Organizations struggled with outdated documents, duplicate files, poor search results, unclear ownership, and conflicting versions long before generative AI entered the workplace. Employees have always needed judgment and organizational context to determine whether the information they find is trustworthy.
AI changes how people encounter the problem.
Traditional search might return ten questionable results and leave the employee to decide which one is authoritative. An AI system may synthesize across those same ten results and return one confident-looking answer.
That can make weaknesses in the underlying knowledge environment much less visible to the person asking the question.
If an AI system has access to an approved policy, two obsolete versions, a draft revision, meeting notes discussing possible changes, and a presentation summarizing the policy, all of that content can potentially inform its answer. The user may never see the conflicting source material or realize that there was a conflict to resolve.
Organizations can use AI effectively even while their information environments are still evolving. As AI systems become another way people access and use organizational information, thoughtful decisions about what should be broadly available, searchable, and treated as organizational knowledge become increasingly important.
AI has simply made an old knowledge management problem harder to ignore.
Permissions Are Part of the Knowledge Environment
If employees regularly encounter information they can't access, the permissions model may indeed be too restrictive. Constant access requests create friction, slow down work, and encourage people to create their own copies simply so they can get things done.
Removing most of the permissions may make the access requests disappear. It also gives a much larger group of people the ability to change information others depend on.
Most of this doesn't involve malicious behavior; it's simply what happens when people make mistakes or don't realize how others are using shared information. Someone might move a folder without knowing who depends on it, delete a file that appears obsolete, replace a document without realizing the older version is still in use, or reorganize a shared space according to what makes sense for their own work.
The larger the group with permission to make those changes, the more opportunities there are for ordinary human behavior to affect information other people depend on.
These risks belong in the knowledge management conversation alongside security and technology. Protecting organizational knowledge includes preserving its integrity and availability: keeping important information accurate, reliable, and accessible to the people who depend on it.
For many kinds of organizational knowledge, broad read access may be exactly the right default. Policies, templates, guidance, institutional resources, and other commonly useful information often become more valuable when people across the organization can reach them easily.
The ability to change, move, rename, delete, or otherwise manage that information is different. Those permissions should reflect who owns the content, who maintains it, and who is responsible for its accuracy and lifecycle.
Aim for Intentional Openness
Organizations can create just as many knowledge problems by restricting too much. When people can't discover useful information, teams duplicate work, knowledge stays trapped within departments, and personal collections and unofficial copies begin to fill the gaps. Valuable expertise becomes harder to find and reuse across the organization.
A better goal is intentional openness: making broadly useful information easy to find, giving teams appropriate space for their own working content, and applying stronger restrictions where confidentiality, privacy, legal requirements, or business risk call for them. Within each of those spaces, access can also be designed around what people actually need to do with the information, including whether they need to read it, contribute to it, or manage it.
The technology matters, but it shouldn't make the decision.
The more important questions are organizational: What information are we trying to help people find? Which knowledge should people across the organization be able to rely on? Where do teams need room to work without exposing every intermediate artifact to everyone else? Who is responsible for maintaining shared knowledge? And what level of access does someone actually need to use that knowledge effectively?
Those questions lead to a healthier information environment than either tightly controlled silos or an organization-wide free-for-all.
Good knowledge sharing depends on openness. It also depends on curation, ownership, context, and sensible boundaries.
Building a Healthier Knowledge Environment
A healthy knowledge environment makes information easy to find without making it easy to accidentally destroy. It gives teams space to do the messy work of creating and refining knowledge while making valuable organizational knowledge easier for others to discover and use. It reduces unnecessary barriers without turning every draft, duplicate, and abandoned idea into another search result.
Every organization's information environment will have some messiness. What matters is being intentional about what people — and the systems they use — should be able to find, trust, use, and change.
Good knowledge management makes room for both openness and boundaries. The right boundaries make it easier for people to find and use what they need while protecting the organizational knowledge others rely on.
Related Reading
Knowledge Management: An Executive Guide
A practical introduction to building a stronger organizational approach to capturing, organizing, sharing, and maintaining knowledge.
AI Doesn't Fix Knowledge Gaps. It Exposes Them.
AI can make weaknesses in organizational knowledge much easier to see. Explore why knowledge quality, accessibility, and governance matter as organizations adopt AI.
SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive: What Goes Where?
A practical guide to deciding where different kinds of information and collaboration belong across Microsoft 365.
Knowledge Management FAQ
Answers to common questions about knowledge management, including strategy, governance, technology, ownership, and organizational readiness.
