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It's Always the Process, Stupid

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Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#31

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

wavemode wrote: post #10
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…

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").

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.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#32

Post by wavemode »

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.

"Talk to the vendor and see what they say" is an unstructured process relying on unstructured data.

"Ask the vendor this set of 10 compliance questions. We can only buy if they check every box." is a structured process based on structured data.

Both kinds of processes have always existed, long before modern technology. Though only the second kind can be reliably automated.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#33

Post by dkdcio »

wavemode wrote: post #10
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…

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").

“tech is easy, people are hard”

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#34

Post by 1970-01-01 »

notpachet wrote: post #17
1970-01-01 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Russ, Did you read the example? The business process of human bias is gone in the cancer detective phase. AI eliminated it.

Cancer detection is not a process. That's a discrete step in a process. My name isn't Russ. Russ Ackoff was a business process optimization leader from the last century -- a contemporary of Deming and the Toyota school etc.

The article mentions other steps are changing due to AI. It's a ship of Thesus result. Multiple steps are changing, some are eliminated, some are still needed, yet the overall name of the process (cancer detection) doesn't change.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#35

Post by alexpotato »

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 story as it highlights that JUST WRITING DOWN what's happening can be a giant leap forward in terms of getting people to agree on what the process actually IS. If you don't write it down, everyone may go on basing decisions on an incorrect understanding of the system.

A related story:

"As I was writing the documentation on our market data system, multiple people told me 'You don't need to do that, it's not that complicated'. Then they read the final document and said 'Oh, I guess it is pretty complicated' "

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#36

Post by Ologn »

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…

It's The Mythical Man Month idea. Programming software is a different thing than working on an assembly line, or a call center, or in retail sales. You're much better off having four programmers who are worth paying $200k a year than ten programmers who are worth paying $75k a year.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#37

Post by PaulHoule »

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

There was a guy who wrote a blog post in that style who was wondering how it was he'd posted hundreds of messages to people on LinkedIn and gotten no replies.

There are some people who insist on spamming out splog posts in that style, some of them think they are blogging, not splogging, and maybe they have good intentions but that style screams "SPAM!" and unfortunately people who are writing that don't understand how it comes across.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#38

Post by crims0n »

I have complicated feelings towards process, especially in large enterprises. In one hand, I know process is how you get good work out of average people - and that has a lot of value in big businesses because statistically, most people are going to be around average.

On the other hand, I have seen process stifle above average people or so called “rockstars”. The thing is, the bigger your reliance on process, the more you need these people to swoop in and fill in the cracks, save the day when things go horribly wrong, and otherwise be the glue that keeps things running (or perhaps oil for the machine is more apt).

I know it’s not “fair”, and certainly not without risk, but the best way I have (personally) seen it work is where the above average people get special permissions such as global admin or exception from the change management process (as examples) to remove some of the friction process brings. These people like to move fast and stay focused, and don’t like being bogged down by petty paperwork, or sitting on a bridge asking permission to do this or that. Even as a manger, I don’t blame them at all, and all things being equal so long as they are not causing problems I think the business would prefer them to operate as they do.

In light of those observations, I have been wrestling a lot with what it says about process itself. Still undecided.

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