The problem with policy and procedure documents is that they are an anachronism. They belong to a pre-digital world in which the prevailing ethos was ‘command and control’.
The concepts of ‘policy’ and ‘procedure’ as discrete documents are relics of a past world of exclusively paper-published documents. They were bundled into ring-binders and updated sporadically. They were often widely ignored because they were difficult to access (because of limited numbers of copies) and often out of date because it was cumbersome and logistically difficult to update them.
The language typically used was also problematic. There was a general belief that what was written down and published should sound important and ‘official’, but this often resulted in a tone that was bureaucratic, stiff, and remote. Readers struggled to connect with it, and to clearly understand what it meant for them and their work.
The networked digital environment that now prevails has the potential to overcome these shortcomings, but organisations fail to take advantage. Documents that were once distributed on paper are simply converted into PDFs, with the same use of bureaucratic language, the same ineffective writing style, and the same inflexibility. Here are the tell-tale signs of this anachronistic approach:
- PDFs with little or no use of hypertext links (usually an indication that content is developed in isolation and published sporadically)
- scanned hand-written signatures (despite almost every employee now having an online identity that is much harder to fake than a scanned signature)
- ‘document control’ tables that are manually updated in the document (despite the ready availability of content control systems that include version histories)
- file names that contain version numbers (again, despite the ready availability of content control systems that automatically assign version numbers, which can be made to appear in the document and update automatically)
- documents that begin with a separate title page that must be scrolled out of the way to get to the content
- documents with standardised headings, which, under the pressure of filling an otherwise blank space, result in content that is repetitive, generic, and, in many cases, redundant
- long documents that are subject based rather than short ones focused on users’ needs and circumstances
- documents in Intranets grouped under the headings of ‘Policies’ and ‘Procedures’, instead of the categories of organisational activity to which they relate
The starting point for addressing these problems and taking advantage of networked digital environments is to replace policies and procedures with Business Information Topics. These are documents that combine policy and procedure information such that they are:
- user-focused and easy to access
- confined to a specific issue, decision-point, or task (combining, where applicable, elements of policy, procedure, instruction, and explanation)
- written in a way that is concise, direct, and straightforward (so that it is quickly assimilated to support action or decision-making)
- part of a connected network of inter-related units of information that can be explored in one direction to gain broader understanding, or in the other to focus in on greater detail, depending on the links followed (that is, it should be ‘atomic’ in the sense that is a building block for more complex information structures)