Who came up with the notion of a “Process Map”? Who decided that all knowledge workers were nothing but overpaid, posturing, gossiping poor excuses for robots?

They begin by saying things like “Walk me through your process.”

Process does exist, and there are some instances in the “white-collar” world where people follow a specific unchanging protocol. But, in reality, a company does not spend most of its money on these kinds work flows. The people that do these highly repetitive tasks are not paid very well. And for many companies, it is cheaper to pay people $25K a year than it is to buy an automated system.

If you have a degree, you are not doing these kinds of work flows. Or at least, they only make up a small minority of what you do.

You still need to share information with a broad audience, you could still benefit from powerful communication tools, like internal blogs and web based project management tools like Basecamp.

But instead, you are surrounded by IT people who think that the first step in solving all your problems is to gather user requirements, and somewhere, try to find a robotic task or an assembly line process that can be automated.

IT isn’t building you the right tools because they are not asking you the right questions.

My struggle is trying to work out how to shock IT into thinking in a different way about how to help.

You can tell people about agile development techniques until you are blue in the face. You can suggest that they read 37signal’s amazing book - getting real. But sometimes, actually often, the message does not sink in.

A Riddle

I’m going to try a different approach. A different way of showing that asking about process and work flows is actually asking the wrong question. OK, so here’s the riddle.

3 guys are on a business trip. They work for Walmart, so they are forced to share a room. Executives at Walmart really do have to share a room when they are on the road. When they arrive at the motel, the manager is in the back, and the clerk incorrectly tells the business travellers that the room costs $30, or $10 each.

The guys each pay their $10 and go up to their room.

The manager comes back from her break and realizes that the clerk has over charged the guys for the room. The clerk should have charged only $25.

The manager tells the clerk to go upstairs and give the guys back the extra $5.

The clerk goes to the room with 5 one dollar bills. Because the clerk can’t figure out how to split $5 into 3 ways, the clerk decides to give each of the 3 business travellers back $1, and pocket the remaining $2.

Now, here’s the riddle:

The business travellers originally paid $30 or $10 each. After the clerk gave them back $1, they each ended up paying $9.

3 X 9 = 27, so the 3 travellers paid $27,

27 plus the $2 in the clerk’s pocket is $29.

What happened to the extra dollar?

After you have figured this out, realize that your assumptions, and the questions they lead you to can instantly get you off on the wrong track.

Instead of assuming that knowledge workers have a process that needs automating, or a work flow that needs controlling, ask what they do. Maybe they do not need an automation tool. Maybe they need a communication tool. Maybe they need things to help them be more creative.

Practically, creative knowledge workers might need tools like wikis, blogs and customized APIs to legacy systems. Specifically, that means the kind of APIs that allow the knowledge workers to build mashups.

These kinds of tools exist on the open Internet, but so far, these tools do not exist within the enterprise.

I think they don’t exist because IT isn’t asking the right questions.