101–110 of 135 posts
But things that don’t run have much less overhead than code: you don’t need to test then, update them, maintain them, they can’t really “not work”, people will adapt if they don’t make sense.
I /love/ this idea, but I don’t think it’s practical. Documents and business practices are about arranging people into semi-predictable organizations. The computing units of those organizations are people, and people run on text, not code.
Two major factors I see a impediment to this: 1. Most management doesn't understand it and therefore won't champion it. 2. Those few that do understand it will resist it because it reduces the need for management and process. This is similar to the Bible being in a dead language only understood by priests. But how amazing would it be if everything from company policy to product specifications was in a format that cou…
The New Testament is actually in Greek, if you go to any church in Greece they are reading from it in the original language and people understand it fine.
Am I the only one who is mystified by this whole idea? People aren't CPU's. Good luck getting them to follow the code that you thought you were using to define their roles. On the contrary, what makes any complex system work is flexibility. And yes, if that calls into question the whole regulatory regime some companies (believe they) live under ... well, yes.
You'd need something like probabilistic programming language to model discretion.
You'd want some way to compare organizational forms -- minimally build vs buy, but preferably also control via monitoring+specification vs selection+incentive alignment.
You'd probably need the kind of sensors and telemetry that no one would like, to avoid drowning in book-keeping.
Overall, what would the benefit be?
This is not a new or novel idea. I proposed such a thing at the start of my career in tech, and repeatedly propose it when I feel I have ears willing to listen. The problem - and I do mean the problem, the only problem - is the threat this poses to power dynamics in the organization. Compliance people do not benefit from their outputs being readily searchable and indexed like this, because it means there’s less need…
Any books about workgroup power dynamics ? i'm fascinated (morbidly in a way) by that
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 t…
How do you enforce (with code) that all new applications created by various teams get added to the right inventory? At some point a human has to determine if an application is in- or out-of-scope for certain restrictions.
If a compliance framework requires certain hashing algorithms for certain types of data, how does your company-as-code system enforce that?
What I see with compliance is that a lot of it is the framework saying "you must do X and Y and Z", and the solution is to write a document saying "employees must do X and Y and Z" then share it with everyone. Then you take a screenshot of that happening (if even possible - you might instead just swear that it's happening).
I guess what I'm getting at is that there's a huge human element here to begin with. If the article is proposing a structured language for declaring your company and policies, how is that different from a Word doc? That is, unless your structured language is actually interpreted by a program that is capable of enforcing what it says. And I think building that enforcement system would be quite hellish.
[1] "A Universal Lemma For Compliance" https://blog.eutopian.io/a-universal-lemma-for-compliance/
The main problem here is that real people operate in fuzzy domains. Snapping them into place "with code" won't magically resolve the gray areas inherent to the most valuable real workflows. Think about the prized "high agency worker." What makes them desirable is the willingness and ability to make well informed, unilateral decisions on matters that are likely not yet organizationally codified, or codified in a way t…