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Company as Code

blog.42futures.com

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Re: Company as Code

#21

Post by kukkeliskuu »

My company has been working for some years now on usm.tools (https://usm.tools/public/landing/), based on very similar approach.

USM tools is based on Unified Service Management (USM) method, which provides the necessary concepts to take the the vision one step further. The core idea is similar however: everything a company does is a service, and services can be defined as data. The surprising finding from USM is that in practice it is possible to meaningfully define any service only through five types of processes.

As services are data, you can have multiple views on that data. And as all data is in standardized format, it becomes possible to make generic cross-references between USM and for example ISO27K as rules that refer to your data, and those rules can be evaluated. As a result, you can see your ISO27K compliance on a dashboard in real-time.

Re: Company as Code

#22

Post by gearhart »

danielrothmann wrote: post #14

Thanks for sharing! I wrote this post some time ago, and more recently built a thing to do roughly this for my small business: https://github.com/42futures/firm Had it in practice for about 4 months now and happy so far. It works for me, at my small scale. Hoping to share a follow-up with lessons learned soon.

This is incredibly cool.

Licensing it as AGPL-v3 throws up an interesting question - given the thing this produces is your company as code, if you use this does your entire company count as a larger work that would need to be open sourced? Or is there an explicit distinction between the "firmware" (excuse me) and the work product?

Re: Company as Code

#23

Post by keyle »

jesucresta wrote: post #20

I feel like this is kind of missing the point that companies are mainly a group of humans and their roles and responsibilities matter to them emotionally. Managing those expectations and feelings can only be done by other humans that feel empathy (good managers) and abstracting such relationships onto something that can be "versioned, queried, tested, and automatically verified" might create a shitty soulless place t…

You are describing essentially a healthy company.

You're on a tech news website as a reminder.

Re: Company as Code

#24

Post by WilcoKruijer »

The DSL described in this post really resonates with me. I recently worked on a programming language that uses similar structures [0]. It lets the user define entities and their shape (Role, OrganisationalUnit, Person in this post) and entries for those entities. It contains a small scripting API that can be used to derive information from these "facts". Company as code could definitely be implemented on top of this.

[0] https://thalo.rejot.dev/blog/plain-text-knowledge-management

Re: Company as Code

#25

Post by squeefers »

hkhanna wrote: post #7

I do this, more or less, for my small law firm. Employee and client information are stored in Recfiles and accessed with GNU Recutils. Adding or changing is a pull request, and all sorts of GitHub actions run. Works pretty well!

beyond the source controlled database, is it doing the same as what the article describes? ie enforces requirements etc

Re: Company as Code

#27

Post by jasonpeacock »

gearhart wrote: post #22
danielrothmann wrote: post #14

Thanks for sharing! I wrote this post some time ago, and more recently built a thing to do roughly this for my small business: https://github.com/42futures/firm Had it in practice for about 4 months now and happy so far. It works for me, at my small scale. Hoping to share a follow-up with lessons learned soon.

This is incredibly cool. Licensing it as AGPL-v3 throws up an interesting question - given the thing this produces is your company as code, if you use this does your entire company count as a larger work that would need to be open sourced? Or is there an explicit distinction between the "firmware" (excuse me) and the work product?

Licensing generally applies only to the thing being licensed and not its output.

Otherwise all software written with a GPLv3 editor would also be GPLv3…or all software built with a GPLv3 compiler would be GPLv3. (Neither are true)

Re: Company as Code

#28

Post by richardlblair »

jesucresta wrote: post #20

I feel like this is kind of missing the point that companies are mainly a group of humans and their roles and responsibilities matter to them emotionally. Managing those expectations and feelings can only be done by other humans that feel empathy (good managers) and abstracting such relationships onto something that can be "versioned, queried, tested, and automatically verified" might create a shitty soulless place t…

Yes - the author's observations are not wrong. Companies, on paper, are logical. However, as one professor told us in college "All companies are perfect until you introduce the humans".

Humans are messy. Humans work outside of whatever system you create. You can codify all your things all you want, it simply will not capture the operational complexity of a business run by humans.

The problem needs to be flipped on its head. LLMs give us the capacity to do just that. It's far more accurate to analyze what the humans are doing, note deviations and follow up on those where regulatory compliance is required. This captures both written processes as well as their practical implementations.

Re: Company as Code

#29

Post by clcaev »

Well developed and maintained Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) go along way towards repeatable human processes. The hard part is finding the organizational discipline to use/maintain them.

Re: Company as Code

#30

Post by estsauver »

I think the closest that this has come is in the form of GitLab, which pretty famously did a ton of the corporate work in the format of a very open Handbook (https://handbook.gitlab.com/)

In the early years, it was extremely, extremely open and comprehensive. I've definitely looked through it when I wasn't sure how to handle something at work.

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