RAG systems often disappoint because the “knowledge base” is treated as a one-off ingestion job rather than an operational product. When the source-of-truth is unclear, freshness is unmanaged, and permissions are inconsistent, the model’s answers become unpredictable—and trust collapses.
The fix is governance that is lightweight but explicit: ownership, freshness, access control, and measurable quality.
Define sources-of-truth and ownership
Every knowledge base needs named owners, just like a business application. Establish:
- Authoritative sources. Which systems and documents are allowed to answer which questions.
- Domain owners. Who approves inclusion, deprecation, and changes to key content.
- Content lifecycle. What “current” means, and when content should be archived or flagged.
Manage freshness like an SLO
Users notice stale answers quickly. Treat freshness as a measurable objective:
- Change detection. Prefer event-driven ingestion from source systems when possible.
- Staleness budgets. Set a maximum tolerated age for high-impact content.
- Backfills and re-embeddings. Plan for re-indexing when chunking strategies or embedding models change.
Prove access control
Access control is not optional. Apply ACLs in retrieval (not in prompts), and validate them:
- Document-level permissions. Index with permission metadata and filter at query time.
- Tenant separation. Strong isolation for multi-tenant deployments.
- Auditability. Log which sources were retrieved and why they were permitted.
For common RAG pitfalls, see RAG failure modes and evaluation approaches in RAG evaluation playbook.
Make trust visible
Trust improves when the system can show its work:
- Citations with metadata. Include source name, date, owner, and a link to the original.
- Confidence cues. Use retrieval coverage and groundedness checks to decide when to escalate.
- Feedback loops. Let users flag wrong or stale content and route issues to owners.
Ultimately, a governed knowledge base is what turns a RAG proof-of-concept into a dependable enterprise capability.