The Computer Virus - A lesson for process mapping your business

Let's put a little wager on the fact that from the title of my blog, you'll be thinking the chaos of getting a computer virus was a great reason for getting business processes in order.  And whilst that could be a "mistake" that teaches you about IT processes, there is a very different reason I learnt about process mapping from computer viruses.  There are so many procedures in the most simple business structure, where do you start?


"An informed agent that attempts to deliberately damage a network will not eliminate the nodes randomly, but will preferentially target the most connected nodes. To simulate an attack we first remove the most connected node, and continue selecting and removing nodes in decreasing order of their connectivity." (Albert-László Barabási in his 2000 journal article 'Error and attack tolerance of complex networks').  Essentially, Professor Barabási  is stating a fairly obvious truth.  The Internet is made up of billions of connections (in 2000 it was around 800 million).  Yet it is only an average of 19 hops from your computer to any other point on the net.  In fact, us organic computers must be even better at networking because it is an average of 6 degrees of separation between you and any of the other 6 billion people on the planet.  And this is all to do with hubs, or very connected people (referred to as Mavens by Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point).  These are the most connected nodes that hold up these short connections, it's what creates these 'small worlds' that allows us to connect in six steps to anyone.

Coming back to Professor Barabási's research, the above diagrams shows a scale-free network.  The red dots are the most connected hubs and the green dots represent those points which are directly connected to a hub.  Take out those 5 little red dots and you are left with a lot of disconnection.  

And processes?  Where do you start in your business?  If you brain storm what processes your business consists of, you'll soon find that there are "hubs" in your processes (look at the above diagram, very similar to a brainstorm map).  It could be that accounting is a big part of your business, or that Marketing may have the largest number of processes hanging from it.  In your business, chances are, it is what you do day to day that is your hub.  It's essential that as you create a list of processes, you find your "hubs".  Once you have isolated these "hubs" you can immediately start building the most used processes and the surrounding support processes.

"Hubs" in process provide the backbone that quickly links seemingly disparate procedures to each other.  So, this is how the not-so-humble computer virus inspired us to find the hubs and give a roaring kick-start to the workflow maps and business operations manuals of our clients.