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It's Always the Process, Stupid

its.promp.td

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Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#111

Post by chanux »

evrydayhustling wrote: post #59
Lapalux wrote: post #3

>It is the first technology that is truly useful for handling unstructured data. >Processes that rely on unstructured data are usually unstructured processes. I appreciate someone succinctly summing up this idea.

Best lines in this article. But it doesn't get to IMO a very important point: why can't these processes easily be structured? Here are some good reasons: - Your process interacts with an unstructured external world (physical reality, customer communication, etc.) - Your process interacts with differently structured processes, and unstructured in the best agreed transfer protocol (could be external, like data sources,…

This write up on a paper about business process redesign is such a fine read https://ferd.ca/notes/paper-moving-off-the-map.html

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#112

Post by chanux »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #67
wavemode wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A similar observation commonly comes up related to software development - "it's not tech debt, it's org debt" (or to put a different way, "trying to use a technical solution to solve a social problem").

Oh, now I have a name for the epidemic pervasive through our company. Almost all of the tech debt we have was introduced by leadership guidance to ignore. And all additional debt to manage it or ameliorate it (since problems don't just go away) is also guidance from leadership to fast track fixes. What happened to the days where software engineers were the experts who decided tech priority?

> guidance from leadership to fast track fixes.

That is *IF* there ever is acknowledgment that things need to be fixed.

"These pesky issues, who knows where they come from, just quickly get it out of the way. We have the next shiny new to tackle for the next quarter, and we better finish it quickly".

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#113

Post by Telaneo »

chanux wrote: post #110
Waterluvian wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What drives me nuts is how many people can’t separate those two tasks/projects. We’re going to write down what Step 7 currently is/does. No, now is not the time to start discussing what it ought to do. Please let us just get through sorting out what Step 7 currently is. Yes, some people do it differently. That’s why we hit a snag. Let’s just pick one of those wrong ways, document it, and do it all wrong together. We’…

What drives me nuts is how many people don't read! With that out of the way, the original article and this comment thread really makes me feel good by giving a sense of being right. > Let’s just pick one of those wrong ways, document it, and do it all wrong together. This reminds me of my colleague who established the importance of consistency very early. "If you need to be wrong to be consistent, be consistently wro…

If nothing else, if things are consistently wrong, they can be consistently fixed.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#114

Post by MengerSponge »

alexpotato wrote: post #35

One of my favorite stories about processes and documentation: - Work at a hedge fund - Every evening, the whole firm "cycles" to start the next trading day - Step 7 of 18 fails - I document Step 7 and then show it to a bunch of folks - I end up having a meeting where I say: "Two things are true: 1. You all agree that Step 7 is incorrectly documented. 2. You all DISAGREE on what Step 7 should be doing" I love this sto…

Feynman's Algorithm:

Write down the problem. Think very hard. Write down the solution.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#115

Post by zoom6628 »

Great article. I think of AI when considering where and how to use as Automated Intelligence and when thinking about risk AI can also mean Accelerated Incompetence. Which end of this scale you end up on depends on taking the hype or systems thinking approach to the opportunity/problem being addressed.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#116

Post by DocIsInDaHouse »

vanschelven wrote: post #9
chrisweekly wrote: post #5

> Let’s rip the Band-Aid off immediately: If your underlying business process is a mess, sprinkling "AI dust" on it won’t turn it into gold. It will just speed up the rate at which you generate garbage. In the world of Business IT, we get seduced by the shiny new toy. Right now, that toy is Artificial Intelligence. Boardrooms are buzzing with buzzwords like LLMs, agentic workflows, and generative reasoning. Executive…

Although I very much agree with the sentiment "here's the hard truth" is LinkedIn speak/ LLM-tell to me

yep, in fact, I did use LLMs to formulate the text (I used several one, t'il I got the result that I wanted) and tweak some parts of it manually - Here are the prompts that I used:

"it's always the process, stupid!

In the context of business IT, it is always and only about BPO, nothing else. so if you want to be successful implementing AI in the enterprise context, you have to handle it like every other software tool: look at your processes and find out how AI, agentic or not, can help optimize the process or help build a better process. Like every technology, AI dont make more intelligent, it only makes faster

write me a blog post to express this ideas"

and i added this in a second step

"i need to integrate another idea:

AI is very good at handling unstructured data, in fact, it's the first tool that is very useful for that. But most processes that uses unstructured data are not documented, as they are also often unstructured. So to implement AI in processes, we must improve our process design"

Fact: when you know what you want to achieve, AI can be very useful, especially for lazy people like me ;)

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#117

Post by Spooky23 »

orev wrote: post #49
Spooky23 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that’s a pretty powerful capability. I recently did a pilot project where we reduced the time for a high friction IT Request process from 4 day fulfillment to about 6 business hours. By “handing text and unstructured data”, the process was able to determine user intent, identify key areas of ambiguity that would delay the request, and eliminate the ambiguity based on data we have (90%) or by asking a yes/no que…

I suspect that could have also been accomplished without any kind of AI. Most processes are inefficient simply because nobody has taken the time to optimize them (and rightly so if they’re not used often enough to justify the time; premature optimization and all that). The act of simply deciding to optimize something, and then looking at it, usually results in significant gains just because of that, regardless of wha…

You’re missing the point.

We knew about the problem for some time. The technical issue isn’t rocket science. The problem is the cost of changing the processes and human behavior is expensive in terms of time and energy, and we’d spend a lot of man hours and maybe cash on it.

So we used a tool and fixed the process in a few days. That’s a win, unless you believe the hype that AGI is upon us!

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#118

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

rootnod3 wrote: post #63
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear that one a lot but pretty frequently it's applied to "social problems" which were caused by technology. It seems to imply some kind of technology/society boundary which doesn't actually exist.

There very much is that boundary. Jira by tech itself is a good product, but now try shoving it down people’s throats and see how that goes. Or on a bigger scale look at FB/Social media and society. There definitely without a doubt is a boundary. They interact and overlap.

Jira by itself is a bunch of bits, it's only good or bad as judged by a community of users whose needs it does or does not meet.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#119

Post by wizzwizz4 »

DocIsInDaHouse wrote: post #116
vanschelven wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although I very much agree with the sentiment "here's the hard truth" is LinkedIn speak/ LLM-tell to me

yep, in fact, I did use LLMs to formulate the text (I used several one, t'il I got the result that I wanted) and tweak some parts of it manually - Here are the prompts that I used: "it's always the process, stupid! In the context of business IT, it is always and only about BPO, nothing else. so if you want to be successful implementing AI in the enterprise context, you have to handle it like every other software tool…

This is a lot easier to read than the blog post.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#120

Post by theshrike79 »

Waterluvian wrote: post #82
alexpotato wrote: post #35

One of my favorite stories about processes and documentation: - Work at a hedge fund - Every evening, the whole firm "cycles" to start the next trading day - Step 7 of 18 fails - I document Step 7 and then show it to a bunch of folks - I end up having a meeting where I say: "Two things are true: 1. You all agree that Step 7 is incorrectly documented. 2. You all DISAGREE on what Step 7 should be doing" I love this sto…

What drives me nuts is how many people can’t separate those two tasks/projects. We’re going to write down what Step 7 currently is/does. No, now is not the time to start discussing what it ought to do. Please let us just get through sorting out what Step 7 currently is. Yes, some people do it differently. That’s why we hit a snag. Let’s just pick one of those wrong ways, document it, and do it all wrong together. We’…

This is also what's preventing the EU from stopping messing with clocks twice a year.

1) everyone agrees that it's stupid to move the clocks, we have electric lights now

2) NOBODY agrees which timezone everyone should be when we stop messing with the time.

Because solving 1&2 at the same time is about impossible, nothing will happen. What they should do is agree on 1. Write it into irrevocable law. THEN start arguing about 2.

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