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It's Always the Process, Stupid

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Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#41

Post by PaulHoule »

Ologn wrote: post #36
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…

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.

I'm going to argue that, at scale, process beats the quality of the people you're using -- and also that there are toxic cultures, around Google and C++, where very smart people get seduced into spending all their time and effort fighting complexity, battling 45 minute builds, etc.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#42

Post by CPLX »

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.

In fairness, that is an extraordinary talent. The reality is that a huge amount of processes that exist have critical steps where humans have to make judgments because the information (was thought to be) not clear and structured enough for a machine.

For many processes that have just suddenly changed, somewhat subjective evaluations can be made reliably by an AI. At least as reliably as was being done before by relatively junior or outsourced staff.

Replacing low-level employees relying on a decision matrix playbook-type document with AI has a LOT of applications.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#43

Post by bluecheese452 »

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…

There is an ai strategy if you are selling hype instead of products.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#44

Post by NebulaStorm456 »

andai wrote: post #39

>They think artificial intelligence brings intelligence. It doesn't. What does it bring?

If your answer requires clustering and assembling disparate facts strewn about on the internet or company data / documents and reasoning over them, then LLMs can help that. Atleast that's what I did when I used to answer questions on stackoverflow.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#45

Post by NeutralForest »

crims0n wrote: post #38

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…

The Agile Manifesto says "People over process", this can be interpreted in many ways. But ideally you follow the 80/20 rule and have clear cut processes for the most frequent cases and/or liability/law/SLA stuff you can't do without. But you should have fast escape hatches as well imo where a good engineer having admin access on a platform or deploying a hot-fix is also possible.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#46

Post by zahlman »

PaulHoule wrote: post #41
Ologn wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm going to argue that, at scale, process beats the quality of the people you're using -- and also that there are toxic cultures, around Google and C++, where very smart people get seduced into spending all their time and effort fighting complexity, battling 45 minute builds, etc.

> and also that there are toxic cultures, around Google and C++, where very smart people get seduced into spending all their time and effort fighting complexity, battling 45 minute builds, etc.

Not sure what you mean here. "Fighting" as in "seeking to prevent", or "putting up with", or what exactly? Is this supposed to be bad because it's exploitative, or because it's a poor use of the smart person's time, or what exactly?

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#47

Post by zahlman »

NebulaStorm456 wrote: post #44
andai wrote: post #39

>They think artificial intelligence brings intelligence. It doesn't. What does it bring?

If your answer requires clustering and assembling disparate facts strewn about on the internet or company data / documents and reasoning over them, then LLMs can help that. Atleast that's what I did when I used to answer questions on stackoverflow.

You did read https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831 , yes?

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#49

Post by orev »

Spooky23 wrote: post #30
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 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 what tools were used.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#50

Post by tetha »

crims0n wrote: post #38

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…

One thing process protects against is lazy people.

Like, we recently had an incident where someone just pasted "401 - URL" into the description and sent it off. We recently asked someone to open the incident through the correct channels. We got a service request "Fix" with the mail thread attached to it in a format we couldn't open. We get incidents "System is slow, infrastructure is problem" from random "DevOps" people.

Sadly, that is the crap you need to deal with. This is the crap that grinds away cooperative culture by pure abuse. Before a certain dysfunctional project was dumped on us as "Make it Saas", people were happy to support ad-hoc, ambitious and strange things.

We are now forced by this project to enforce procedure and if this kills great ideas and adventures, so be it. The crappy, out-of-process things cost too much time.

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