In my last article we talked about why you can’t document your way to full RMF compliance. Technical controls like AU-4 and AC-2.5 require evidence, not narratives. Questionnaire-to-LLM automation that spits out claims without proof is documentation theater.
But here’s the thing: some controls explicitly DO require documentation.
Take any “-1” control in NIST 800-53. AC-1. IA-1. AU-1. The language is unambiguous:
“Develop, document, disseminate, review and update…”
For these controls, the policy artifact IS the compliance. There’s no system behavior to measure. No logs to collect. No configuration to inspect. You need an actual, readable, assessor-ready policy document.
So if documentation is the right answer for these controls, mission accomplished, right?
Not even close.
The Problem: Your Documentation is Already Dead
Here’s the uncomfortable truth about RMF documentation: it starts dying the moment you finish writing it.
The typical lifecycle:
- Spend weeks crafting your Access Control Policy
- Map every control manually
- Get it reviewed and approved
- Upload to SharePoint
- Six months later, your MFA implementation changes
- The policy is now technically wrong
- But updating means re-opening Word, finding the right sections, editing manually, getting re-approval
- So nobody updates it
- The document drifts further from reality
- Until the next audit forces a scramble to fix everything at once
You end up with zombie documentation: technically existing, but not actually alive. Not synchronized with your systems. Not reflecting current reality. Not useful to anyone except as a checkbox for assessors.
And the assessor experience isn’t even good. They open your 47-page policy looking for AC-2(5), find it buried in paragraph 8 of section 4.2.3, then notice it contradicts what’s in your GRC tool, and we’re back to “we’ll update that” responses.
Meanwhile, practitioners who actually need to understand the system’s access control approach get greeted with a table of contents that’s literally just control IDs and a document structured like a control-to-paragraph lookup table.
This isn’t a policy document. It’s a compliance artifact formatted as a Word file.
What “AI Documentation” Tools Actually Deliver
When vendors promise “automated policy generation,” the approach is usually:
Questionnaire + Generic Template → AI Model → Policy Doc
It’s faster than starting from scratch. But you get generic boilerplate that could apply to any organization, control mappings you still have to maintain manually, and a dead document the moment you export it.
Change your MFA provider six months later? Your choices are:
- Regenerate and lose all your edits
- Manually update and break the AI connection
- Just don’t update it and hope nobody notices
Most tools stop at “brain dump your responses, get a document, you’re done.”
But that document is already a zombie.
What If Documentation Could Actually Stay Alive?
Imagine if your documentation worked differently.
What if your Access Control Policy knew about the actual assets in your environment? What if it referenced the network diagram you built—and when that diagram updated, the policy automatically reflected the change?
What if your authentication section automatically updated when you changed your MFA implementation in your system configuration?
What if the asset inventory table in your policy pulled live data from your actual asset list, so you never had to manually sync them?
What if you could read beautiful, flowing narrative without inline control IDs cluttering every sentence—but auditors could still click any control and instantly highlight every relevant section down to the control objective level?
What if documentation wasn’t something you wrote once and maintained manually—but something that lived and breathed with your actual environment?
That’s the difference between zombie docs and live docs.
Live Documentation: Synchronized, System-Aware, Always Current
Most organizations accept that documentation will always be out of date. It’s just the nature of the beast, right?
Wrong.
Documentation drifts because traditional approaches treat docs as static files disconnected from the systems they describe. Fix the disconnect, and you fix the drift.
RiskForce Document Builder was designed around a different principle: documentation should react to your environment.
When your vulnerability scan updates, your risk assessment reflects it. When your asset list changes, your policies reference the current inventory. When your network architecture evolves, your diagrams and the documents that reference them stay in sync.
When you update a control response, the policy regenerates that section. When you update the policy, the control stays synchronized.
Your documents become living artifacts that reflect reality—not static files you fight to keep current.
And you get this without sacrificing readability. Professional prose flows naturally. Control mappings exist invisibly underneath. Assessors get what they need. Practitioners can actually understand the system’s approach.
You can use pre-built templates or build your own. You can brain-dump responses or write polished content from the start. You can let AI generate flowing narrative or edit every word yourself.
The platform adapts to how you work—while maintaining the synchronization that keeps everything alive.
Better, Faster, More Efficient
RiskForce was built with a clear goal: automate RMF the right way.
Not “make bad processes faster.” Not “generate generic boilerplate and call it done.” Not “satisfy the checkbox without improving the outcome.”
Automate RMF by making both the speed AND quality better.
The automation that matters isn’t generating a document once. It’s keeping that document synchronized with your environment across its entire lifecycle.
That’s the difference between zombie docs and live docs.
Want to see documentation that stays alive?
RiskForce Orchestrator is available through Platform One Solutions Marketplace and as a commercial subscription.
Contact: contact@riskforce-llc.com Start 30-Day Free Trial
Because good documentation shouldn’t require constant life support.