A Large Payroll Services Company

Comtech completed a joint study with two groups at a large payroll services company to develop a comprehensive, corporate-wide single-source solution. For the documentation organization, we did a complete investigation and analysis of audience categories and output requirements for the audiences, the information products (user guides, references guides, technical publications) currently being produced, and the process the organization has been using to prepare its information products. As a result of the investigation, we recommended that the copmany's documentation organization develop an Information Model that will account for their complete knowledge-transfer strategy. We also recommended that they acquire a component-management system, adopt structured writing and minimalism techniques, and work closely with training to achieve maximum reuse of components. We continued to work with the documentation organization to implement the recommendations. In addition, Comtech conducted a parallel study for the company's new-product training organization. With this group, we have conducted a series of site visits to the company's regional organizations. At the visits, we worked to understand the challenges of training customer service representatives and account executives to handle customer issues, questions, and problems effectively. We also used the visits to gain insight into the information needs of the customers that the regions serve. The next step is for the company to gain direct information from end customers. At present, many end-customer information needs are being fulfilled by calls to customer service.

As a goal of both consulting projects, the company intends to integrate documentation and training and to use a common repository for information that will encourage reuse across media. They also hope to link the information repository with a similar project underway in the support organization to build a knowledge-management system using Knowledge Bridge technology. The data being developed for the Knowledge Bridge will be linked to the data in the information and training repository in a corporate-wide knowledge-transfer solution.