What the firm already knows, findable by the next person who needs it, with the source and the date in view.
Problem
A firm's working knowledge sits in memos, decks, email threads and the memory of a few senior people. Finding what was decided last time means asking around, and the answer depends on who is still at the firm.
The cost shows up as repeated analysis, inconsistent positions on similar questions, and judgment that leaves when a person does. The deeper question is ownership: whether the firm keeps this context in a form it controls or rents it back from a vendor.
Typical applications: investment memo assembly and research retrieval.
Shape
The steps below are platform-neutral. A platform page shows which vendor capability carries each one.
- Agree which sources count as the firm's record, and which do not.
- Capture those sources with their author, date and access level intact.
- Index them so a question returns passages, not only file names.
- Answer questions with the supporting passages cited beside the answer.
- Assemble first drafts of recurring documents, such as an investment memo, from cited material.
- Record which answers were corrected, and feed corrections back to the source of record.
Control set
The control set is part of the design, not a follow-up. Each control is agreed with the process owner before the build starts.
| Control | How it is met |
|---|---|
| Review | Any assembled draft is reviewed and signed by its author before it is used. Answers are presented as retrieval with citations, not as conclusions. |
| Data | Access follows the permissions of the source. A person cannot retrieve through the workflow what they could not open directly. Client-confidential and personal data are scoped before capture. |
| Monitoring | Questions asked, answers with no supporting source, and corrections are logged and reviewed. |
| Off switch | Retrieval and drafting can be disabled independently. The underlying sources are unaffected. |
| Correction | A wrong answer is traced to its source passage. The source is corrected or retired, so the error does not recur. |
Measures
Reference design. This pattern has not yet produced measured results in a C9D Consulting engagement. The targets below are examples of the shape, not results and not promises. Real targets come from the baseline measured in the diagnostic.
| Baseline | Metric | Example target |
|---|---|---|
| Time to locate a prior decision or analysis | Time to answer with a cited source | Minutes, not a round of emails |
| Drafting time for a recurring document | Hours from request to reviewable draft | A first draft within one working day |
| Answers returned without a source | Uncited answers | None |
Handoff
At the end, the client team owns:
- The source-of-record list and the rule for adding to it
- An access model the firm's own administrators maintain
- A runbook for retiring stale sources and handling corrections
- Champions in each team that contributes sources
Where it applies
No platform application of this pattern is published yet. The pattern does not depend on any one vendor, and the choice of where the firm's context lives is part of the decision the engagement settles.
Engagement
This pattern is not sold on its own. It is delivered through the engagement shapes in the Engagement Specification.
- E-01 Decision Advisory. Settles whether this pattern is the right first move, on which process and on which platform. It starts with a diagnostic and ends with the playbook handoff.
- D-01 Delivery Engagement. Where the client wants the workflow built, the build ends with working software and its playbook.
Read the Engagement Specification, or request a conversation.