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It's Always the Process, Stupid

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Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#21

Post by TimPC »

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…

I feel like this is an inside view from the BPO community and the only part of AI they see is the part that affects BPO. But for most businesses AI strategy is not about AI for internal use but AI to either improve customer funnels or launch new products. Most of the companies I've talked to in the past year wanted a strategy for customer facing AI not internal AI.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#23

Post by wizzwizz4 »

TimPC wrote: post #21
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…

I feel like this is an inside view from the BPO community and the only part of AI they see is the part that affects BPO. But for most businesses AI strategy is not about AI for internal use but AI to either improve customer funnels or launch new products. Most of the companies I've talked to in the past year wanted a strategy for customer facing AI not internal AI.

LLMs do not improve customer funnels. Well-designed decision-trees can, but we're not calling those "AI" at the moment.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#24

Post by Spooky23 »

defaultcompany wrote: post #18
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.

This doesn’t ring true to me. Having processes which rely on communication between humans using natural language can of course be either structured or unstructured. Plenty of highly functioning companies existed well before structured data was even a thing.

Technology folks often confuse structured data needed for their computing function as being needed for the business process.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#25

Post by ashu1461 »

I think there is one counter argument, LLMs are speeding up everything, including the speed of learning, which also implies that companies that might have bad processes would learn and move to good processes as well on the way.

Example, one of many things, in our SDLC process, now we have test cases and documentation which never existed before (coming from a startup).

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#26

Post by yannyu »

defaultcompany wrote: post #18
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.

This doesn’t ring true to me. Having processes which rely on communication between humans using natural language can of course be either structured or unstructured. Plenty of highly functioning companies existed well before structured data was even a thing.

Structured data doesn't have be a database. It can be a checklist, a particular working layout, or even just a defined process. Many high functioning companies spent a lot of time on those kinds of things, which became a competitive advantage.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#27

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #19
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…

Almost every problem a modern corpo has can be solved with an appropriate head-count of appropriately trained/educated people, and that's why none of them get solved. The processes suck because of decades of corner cutting and "fat" trimming while the executives congratulate themselves for only making the product a biiiit worse in exchange for a 0.0005% cost reduction, before then offsetting any gains by giving thems…

Honestly, I don't know if throwing people at a problem is the way to go. Doubly so given that a good chunk of the projects lately for me deal with third party vendors and those are so .. embedded that even getting basic requirements, documentation is an uphill battle ( which -- to me -- seems insane ). I have zero pull so I do what I can, notate the insanity for cya and move on.

I do agree on execs congratulating themselves afterwards though. It was obscene last year. This year it was mildly muted.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#28

Post by balamatom »

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote: post #27
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost every problem a modern corpo has can be solved with an appropriate head-count of appropriately trained/educated people, and that's why none of them get solved. The processes suck because of decades of corner cutting and "fat" trimming while the executives congratulate themselves for only making the product a biiiit worse in exchange for a 0.0005% cost reduction, before then offsetting any gains by giving thems…

Honestly, I don't know if throwing people at a problem is the way to go. Doubly so given that a good chunk of the projects lately for me deal with third party vendors and those are so .. embedded that even getting basic requirements, documentation is an uphill battle ( which -- to me -- seems insane ). I have zero pull so I do what I can, notate the insanity for cya and move on. I do agree on execs congratulating the…

You can always throw other things at those people instead.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#29

Post by bathtub365 »

TimPC wrote: post #21
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…

I feel like this is an inside view from the BPO community and the only part of AI they see is the part that affects BPO. But for most businesses AI strategy is not about AI for internal use but AI to either improve customer funnels or launch new products. Most of the companies I've talked to in the past year wanted a strategy for customer facing AI not internal AI.

The last time a company put an AI chat bot between me and actual customer service it didn’t listen to my problem and hallucinated something I didn’t say.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#30

Post by Spooky23 »

zkmon wrote: post #7

This should go to all CEOs. They should realize that the real problem AI solves is handling of text and unstructured data. That is the core ability. But I don't blame them. Process optimization is hard. If a new tool promises more speed, without changing the process, they are ready to pour money at that.

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 question to someone.

All using GCP tools integrating with a service platform, our ERP and other data sources. Total time ~3 weeks, although we cheated because we understood both the problem and process.

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