Thinking for a Living

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Knowledge Work Processes

A time-honored way of improving any form of work is to treat it as a process. To treat something as a process is to impose a formal structure on it—to identify its beginning, end, and intermediate steps, to clarify who the customer is for it, to measure it, to take stock of how well it is currently being performed, and ultimately to improve it. A process orientation implies design—we’re not just accepting work the way it is, but trying to find better ways to perform it. Once this structure is imposed on work, the objectives for improvement may be incremental or radical, and there are various ways to improve processes. It is often a good idea to conduct a process analysis before applying technology to work, so that ...