The glossary
Every operation has a desk. These are the words we use for its parts. If you came looking for what the industry calls workflow automation or an AI agent, start with the desk; the rest follows.
A desk has the same parts wherever it runs: work arrives, a person decides, a clock runs, and the record builds. These are the words we use for those parts, so you don't have to learn a product's vocabulary first.
They are also the words we use in a fitting. If one of them is doing too much work, tell us.
One business process, running. Documents arrive, a skilled human makes the call, and a clock is running. A desk exists before anyone writes it down; the only question is whether it has been.
Not a diagram, a project, or a piece of software. The desk is the work itself.
Where work arrives. A fax, an email, an upload, a form somebody handed across a counter. The connectors change from desk to desk; the in-tray is the place the work lands.
Not one system's inbox. Work can arrive through four systems and a fax machine in the same hour.
The human decision. The pharmacist, the quality engineer, or the underwriter reviews the file and makes the call. Marshall lays the file out open — evidence assembled, criteria surfaced, history attached — and the stamp stays with the person.
Not an approval button bolted onto an automated flow. The judgment is the point.
Everything written down as it happens: who stamped, what moved, how long each step took. Read across time, it is where the numbers come from.
Not a dashboard built after the fact. If the work wasn't written down, there is no logbook to report from.
The deadlines on a desk, and what late means there. A prior authorization has a payer's clock. A non-conformance has an audit clock.
Not a timer on a task. The clock is the deadline the work has to meet.
What a desk looks like without a relay: work that has arrived and not moved.
Not a drawer of cards. A pile is work waiting for someone to pick it up.
The designs on display. Walk up to one, study it, take it. A design is the working layout of a real operation, not a template.
Not the floor. The floor is the desks that exist. The catalog is designs.
The work that follows the design: we learn your desk, fit the design to it, wire it into your systems, and stay while your team works it.
Not the first call. The first look comes before it.
The call before the fitting. Bring one desk and its worst week; we tell you whether it is a desk we can build.
Not a demo. We look at your work, not ours.
The tests, written from your war stories before the desk exists. They run red first, then green as the desk learns the week that burned you.
Not a demo script. A drill is a test the desk has to pass, not a scene it has to perform.
The part of the desk that runs without a person: parsing, routing, drafting, chasing, logging. Individually, name the job; collectively, the relay.
Not an agent that decides. The relay moves the work, and a person still stamps it.
Where the cards are filed, under a name: the patient, the client, the supplier. Open it and everything that happened with that name is in one place.
Not a job folder. File under a job and the card is lost the day the job ends.
A few lines somebody writes when it happens: what came in, what they did, what happened next. The date, and their name.
Not a task, a form, or a row in a table. A card that doesn't say who wrote it can't be checked later.
The desk as it runs before anyone writes it down: in heads, in habits, on a spreadsheet by the phone. It is not broken and it is not empty. It is a working desk nobody can read.
Not a blank desk. The work is there; the record is not.
The glossary is a working document. If the desk you're looking at uses a word that isn't here, bring it to the first look. We'll tell you what we call it, or we'll add it.
Show us your desk →