We want to feed our standard operating procedures into an AI agent to answer operational questions, but our internal documentation is full of conflicting steps and department-specific jargon. What data hygiene work must happen first?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Feeding messy standard operating procedures into an AI agent produces confident nonsense. If your internal documentation contains obsolete policies, conflicting instructions, and departmental jargon, an internal assistant will only amplify that confusion.

Data hygiene for standard operating procedures does not require a year-long knowledge management overhaul. Follow the EOS® approach of documenting the twenty percent of the steps that drive eighty percent of the results.

Begin with terminology. If operations calls a customer record an account, sales calls it an opportunity, and billing calls it a client file, standardise that taxonomy first. Language models struggle when three departments describe the exact same operational milestone using different words.

Next, eliminate conflicting versions. Gather the process owners across the Accountability Chart to IDS® the contradictions. If field service says technicians order parts through an app, but accounting documentation says parts require a written purchase order, decide the single standard before uploading documents.

Finally, strip out narrative fluff. Standard operating procedures should be concise, step-by-step checklists, not twenty-page histories of how the department used to work. Clean, structured text with clear operational triggers and accountable seats will make any retrieval-augmented generation tool immediately useful.