Internal policy and IT process chat assistant
Problem
Staff send the same questions to the service desk inbox and to whichever colleague answered them last time: how to request a laptop, what the leaver process is, whether a vendor is on the approved list, how long an expense receipt needs to be kept. The answers exist, scattered across a document management system nobody searches, a set of intranet pages that predate the current org chart, and the memory of two or three long-serving staff. A junior analyst spends part of most days answering questions that are already written down somewhere, and when that analyst is on leave, the answer is either a wait or a guess that turns out wrong.
Product idea
A chat assistant that sits inside the messaging app staff already have open, answers process and policy questions directly from a curated set of policy documents and service desk knowledge base articles, and says so when it does not know rather than guessing. A question it cannot answer with confidence is handed off with the original wording attached, so the analyst does not start from a blank field. Every unanswered or low confidence question is logged in a short weekly digest for the document owner, so gaps in the policy library become visible instead of staying invisible. It does not action anything: no password resets, no access changes, no approvals. It answers questions and hands off what it cannot.
Who it is for
Service desk staff fielding repeat questions, and any employee who would rather ask than search a drive. Sponsored by the service desk lead, who owns the escalation queue and the weekly gap digest.
Possible first version
A chat interface fed by a manually curated set of up to fifty policy and process documents, uploaded and re-uploaded by hand rather than synced live. It answers from that set, states its confidence, and offers an escalation path when unsure. Escalated questions are emailed to the service desk lead with the original question attached, rather than created automatically inside the ticketing tool. A simple weekly digest lists unanswered questions. Out of scope for version one: any write access to the service desk system, any HR or payroll-specific content, and any live sync with the document management system.
- Build classification
- Workflow application
- Rough effort
- 4-6 week first release
- Roles involved
- Service desk lead, Head of IT, Information security officer
- Relevant to
- Professional club, League office, Federation / governing body, Collegiate athletics
- Systems in play
- Document management and intranets, Service desk and ticketing tools, Messaging apps
- Product framing
- Voice or chat interface
Questions we get asked
What documents does this need before it can answer anything useful?
It only answers from what it has been given, so the day one work is gathering the policy and process documents that already exist and are current, not writing new ones. In practice that is usually thirty to fifty documents: IT request procedures, HR policy summaries, expense rules, the leaver checklist. A stale or contradictory document produces a stale or contradictory answer, so someone needs to own weeding the set before launch, not after.
Does this replace our service desk ticketing tool?
No, it sits in front of it. The ticketing tool remains the system of record for anything that needs a person: an access request, an exception, a complaint. This tool's job is to close off the fraction of enquiries that are really just a matter of where the answer is written down, so the queue that reaches your analysts is the queue that actually needs a human.
What does it deliberately not do?
It does not reset a password, change an access permission, approve an exception, or take any action on a system. It answers a question and, where the question needs a decision or an action, hands it to a person with the context attached. Anyone expecting it to complete a process end to end will be disappointed, and that is by design. The judgement calls stay with staff.
Who has to keep this current once it is live?
Whoever owns each source document, in practice: the service desk lead for process questions, the information security officer for access and security policy, the data manager for data handling questions. The weekly digest of unanswered questions is meant to keep that job small rather than open ended, but it does not run itself. If nobody reads the digest, the assistant's answers drift out of date and nobody notices until a staff member acts on a wrong one.
Is this your workflow?
Tell us one sports workflow that still runs on paper, spreadsheets, WhatsApp or an outdated system. We will map it and show you what a simpler product looks like.
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