Some people are amazed when I tell them what I do for a day job – but it’s so different! Is it? That well-worn lane is where it is because over time, people have found that this is the easiest/best way to get from a to b. Yes, there’s that other way, but it’s boggy in Winter, but this path is always passable, and therefore gets used more. People see the path and use it because it *is* a path, and there it still is today.

It’s the same with business processes. They are a way of getting from a to b, and over the years people have worked out what the best way of achieving that is. On first inspection, you might well ask why they don’t take that other route, as you can’t see any good reason not to. But people that have been there a while know the pitfalls and may even have been that route themselves.

Just as you might put up a sign in the landscape to warn of possible dangers, it’s important to note the other routes that were considered, and why they are not suitable. You stop the potential for endless circular discussion by documenting the warnings, but more importantly, you also allow for the re-evaluation in future, if the pitfalls are made safe. Knowledge is powerful stuff.

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I was slightly disappointed to find that the information on their site was not really up to date, so it instantly lost credibility with me: if there’s one thing I dislike more than lack of data, it’s untrustworthy or stale data.

Somehow, I ended up on the committee and started poking my nose into their website – the problem wasn’t that they had nothing to say, nor that they were doing nothing worth mentioning. The problem was technology. Archaeologists aren’t, for the most part, nerds, so the problem of how to get stuff onto the site was the stumbling block.

Obviously what was needed was some kind of friendly content-management system that would allow any of the committee to make announcements, publish activities and talks and generally tell the world about the exciting things that we do.

I was already a WordPress user and was itching for an excuse to use it as a CMS. It works surprisingly well for what they wanted it to do: members login area, Events (with extra data), easy management of images etc. At some point I will get round to listing all the plugins I used – I’m still documenting it all for the archaeologists!

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