Life in a workflow world

Our working day is an array of processes, procedures and workflows. It might start as soon as we swipe a security card through the door to the office, continue with completing an application for a corporate training course and end up with submitting a form to claim travel expenses. Some of these processes are automated. Whenever we send an e-mail a disclaimer appears at the end without any need to write it out every time. Most of the procedures are in place because of a need to satisfy compliance and regulatory requirements, especially with regard to any financial or personnel decision. Even quite a small organization will have a number of information technology (IT) systems, all of which are based around workflows and databases. Business analysts and developers may well have interviewed us and spent many months working out every possible workflow variation so that these applications can be successfully designed and implemented.

All these procedures and workflows capture data that somewhere along the line may be used to make a business decision. Often this decision is based on aggregated data, perhaps about employee costs or the number of calls to a Help Desk. In aggregating the data and placing it in context, information has been created. Hopefully, there are also processes in place to archive the information, completing an information life cycle that could be made up of many individual processes.

No matter how many systems are in place, and how many procedures are developed, they will never cover every eventuality. Most systems in organizations are designed to collect information, not to distribute it around the organization. When working for an organization with operations in even one other country the systems complexity is substantially increased. We may find an Excel spreadsheet of revenues by customer but is it in euros or sterling? Are they US dollars or Canadian dollars? Is the spreadsheet the latest version? Who can we call to check on the data in one of the cells?

The result is that there are a very large number of informal processes that are not supported by an IT system or even subject to compliance and regulatory oversight. An office may have moved its location, there is a new managing director at a subsidiary company, and the date of the office party has been changed.