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LAS CRUCES, N.M. — ROK Southwest, Inc. (www.roksw.com) has just released a new, free white paper, “An Innovative, Low Cost Approach to Communicating Highly Effective Policies and Procedures,” that explains how line-of-business managers can use existing simple tools and techniques to improve employee productivity and quality of work by more effectively communicating the organization’s “process knowledge.”

Using the information in this white paper, a business unit can implement a process for writing easily understood policies and procedures and rapidly publishing them online without investing in new technology and without making any demands on the organization’s IT infrastructure. The entire white paper is available for download at www.roksw.com/whitepaper.html.

This new non-proprietary approach repurposes an online presentation facility that is built into Microsoft Windows. This facility has very strong navigation and search capabilities, and employees can quickly locate specific information they need to perform a task at hand or answer a customer’s question without disrupting their ongoing work.

The process knowledge itself is created, organized, and maintained by the organization’s subject matter experts using only Microsoft Word. There is no new technology to acquire or learn. The approach stresses strong organization of information, consistent styling, and clear writing, all to meet the overriding objective of ensuring that employees can quickly and accurately comprehend the content.

The solution described in the white paper uses a commercially available software tool to silently convert the knowledge recorded in Word documents to its final online presentation form. The operation of this tool is effectively hidden from the business unit’s staff, who need no special expertise to use it.

Robert H. Spicer, EVP and CIO of Chevy Chase Bank in Bethesda, Maryland, says “This solution allowed us to take thousands of pages of static knowledge and turn it into ‘just-in-time’ interactive expertise. Our staff can quickly query the contents of an electronic knowledge document and get answers to their questions within seconds. This has delivered substantial productivity and quality of service benefits.”

ROK Southwest, Inc. is a small professional services company that specializes in performing document conversions on a contract basis. ROK Southwest formalized the approach described in the white paper after determining that the existing approaches were too complex and costly for the typical business unit.

[tags]ROK Southwest Inc, free white paper, Communicating Highly Effective Policies and Procedures[/tags]