Or: Why we were not satisfied with the state of knowledge management and what we did about it.
There is a situation that many employees are familiar with: You are faced with a task that really should have been taken care of ages ago. Perhaps it is a customer enquiry that a colleague already answered last week. Perhaps it is a process document that exists somewhere in SharePoint – but nobody can remember exactly where. Perhaps it is practical knowledge that sits in the mind of a single employee and has not been written down anywhere yet. You search. You ask around. You wait. And at some point you think: This cannot be real.
The real problem is not filing information
Here at DOCUFY, we have been exploring for many years how companies can organise and make knowledge accessible. Our clients come from mechanical engineering, medical technology, the automotive industry and the energy sector – all industries in which knowledge is not just a ‘nice-to-have’, but a significant competitive advantage. What we have noticed time and again in these discussions is that the real problem is never filing information.
Almost every company we’ve encountered has a wealth of systems: SharePoint, Confluence, specialised CCMS solutions, file repositories, ERP systems, specialist applications. Some have evolved over the years; others have been carefully planned. The investments are substantial, as are the volumes of data. And yet, people in these companies experience the same frustration over and over again: they are searching. A lot. And they do not always find what they need.
So the question is not: Where do we store even more knowledge?
The question is: Why is existing knowledge so difficult to use?
What companies really need
The more often we asked this question, the clearer the answer became. The problem is not quantity. The problem is context. A document is only as valuable as the moment in which it is found and understood. A service engineer standing in front of a faulty machine does not need all the manufacturer’s maintenance manuals. They need the one piece of information that applies to precisely this machine, this malfunction, this moment.
A new employee taking on a project does not need the company’s entire archive. They need the context: what decisions were made and why? What is still valid, and what has been rendered obsolete? In discussions with customers, four requirements emerged that were repeatedly highlighted:
Firstly: Knowledge should be consolidated from various sources – without the need to replace systems or migrate data.
Secondly: Connections should be made visible. Knowledge is never in isolation. It is always related to products, processes, projects, machines or standards.
Thirdly: Information should be available in the right context – not as one search result amongst a thousand others, but embedded within the working context of the person who currently has a question.
Fourthly: Knowledge should be available independently of individual people. Experience that exists only in people’s minds is not corporate capital. It is a risk.
The key pain point
This understanding gave rise to the leading question that has shaped the entire development of JUNOfy:
How can knowledge be made not only searchable, but actually usable?
That may sound like a subtle distinction. It is a fundamental one. A good search function solves part of the problem. It helps you find something you already know exists. But it does not create context. It shows hits, not connections. It delivers documents, not guidance.
What people need in difficult moments – when things go wrong, during projects, or when making decisions – is not more information. It is the right insight at the right moment. From the outset, therefore, JUNOfy was never intended to be yet another filing system. Not yet another system that adds another layer to the existing chaos. Rather, it is a platform that connects knowledge, structures it and brings it to life.
The decisions that shaped JUNOfy’s development
There are many decisions between an idea and a platform. Some of them were clear straight away. Others took us longer to work through.
Existing systems remain in place.
That was one of the earliest and most important decisions. Companies have invested in their system landscape over many years. We did not want to build a solution that would devalue this investment or force new migration projects. JUNOfy was designed to connect what already exists – and to create something new from it.
AI as a tool, not as an end in itself.
Artificial intelligence is the talk of the industry. And rightly so, because it opens up new possibilities: better search, automatic classification, intelligent summarisation. However, AI only works if the underlying content is structured and transparent. An AI system built on poor-quality data delivers poor answers – just faster.
That is why we have designed AI in JUNOfy as a support layer: It helps to organise knowledge more effectively, make it easy to find and put it to use. But the foundation is always a clear, contextual structure.
Knowledge needs connections. That was perhaps the most challenging decision from a conceptual point of view – but it is at the heart of JUNOfy. Instead of presenting documents in isolation, we link knowledge to the subject it relates to. A service manual belongs to a machine. A standard belongs to a product. A decision belongs to a project. This contextualisation sounds obvious. In practice, it rarely is.
What JUNOfy makes possible today
With the launch of JUNOfy, this idea becomes a platform that helps companies actually put their existing knowledge to use. In concrete terms, this means: content from different systems is linked. Knowledge is organised intelligently and made available in context. A semantic search takes these connections into account. The Smart Knowledge Chat enables users to interact with the company’s knowledge – not just search within it. And AI-supported classification ensures that new content remains structured and discoverable, even as the volume of knowledge grows.
Clients such as Metrohm and Bertelsmann already use the foundations on which JUNOfy is built: metadata in one case and knowledge bases in the other. With JUNOfy, we bring these approaches together and are now making them more widely accessible – for companies that do not want to reinvent their knowledge management, but finally want to make use of it.
What comes next
The launch is not the end. It is a starting point. Knowledge management is currently undergoing fundamental change. Artificial intelligence is shifting expectations: people no longer want to search. They want to ask questions. They want answers tailored to their situation – not documents they have to analyse themselves. At the same time, demands for transparency and traceability are increasing. Anyone using AI in a business context needs to know where answers come from. Which documents are the source. Whether the knowledge is up to date. JUNOfy will continue to evolve in line with these requirements. With more integration possibilities. With more precise AI. With deeper contextualisation.
The goal remains the same as it was on day one: knowledge should not just be stored. Knowledge should be available where people make decisions, solve problems and drive innovation.
Why we believe the time is right
We did not build JUNOfy because businesses need yet another system. We built JUNOfy because we have seen, day in, day out, just how much potential lies in existing knowledge – and how little of it is actually utilised. This moment – when AI is ready to truly help, and when businesses can clearly identify the problem – feels like the right moment. We look forward to shaping it together with you.
Connect knowledge. Organise knowledge. Use knowledge.
JUNOfy makes knowledge from different systems available in the right context – for businesses that do not want to search for information, but want to use it.
