Based on my experience of working at the bank, I can safely advise that you know your documentation regime is failing when…
- You can’t find a document you are sure you had read before.
- You can’t understand what you are reading because it is either poorly constructed or badly written, with little attention paid to the needs of the reader.
- What you are reading lacks context and you don’t know what its background is, or even if what you are consuming is the most recent version.
- Detail is included without any introduction that guides readers as to what follows, and absent of any summary or explanation as to its appropriateness for purpose.
- You can’t validate what you are reading because the author has omitted key references as to the sources of its content.
- No one has declared it complete, a draft or an initial scoping of a work in progress.
By any account, in any business in the AI age, failing to pay detailed attention to such precious competitive documentation will amount to an expensive lost opportunity to get things right first time around.
So the recipe in the following sections here aims to address the problems before you start on your journey.
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As in the sidebar to the right, the menu of pieces in this series runs as follows:
Start here to build new, smarter AI-driven business productivity
How expectations held of even the best social workplace software can fall short
Challenges of mapping organisational knowledge for AI
What makes managing workplace social content different
This basic AI challenge is present in every organisation
In capturing workplace knowledge, the devil is always in the detail
The lost opportunity of poor documentation
You need a process for commissioning new material
Questions to ask when trying to create the documentation that can deliver superior AI