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It's Always the Process, Stupid

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Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#51

Post by NebulaStorm456 »

zahlman wrote: post #47
NebulaStorm456 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My point was before AI, when I used to answer stackoverflow questions out of curiosity, I used to manually search around on internet to properly answer the question. This is exactly the process LLMs help with.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#53

Post by stuartjohnson12 »

softwaredoug wrote: post #4

My time working in the search field for 13 years, there is always this trend: Leaders think is a good way to save money, but actually is a thing that requires deeper investment to realize more returns, not a money saver.

That's why you need consultants to tell you that has problems, but is really how you save money, and that's why working with a expert is how you can overhaul your business and manage operational costs.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#54

Post by DocTomoe »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #31
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").

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.

Mild disagree.

The saying "you can't solve social problems with technology" usually means - at least in the places I have heard / used it - "If your workforce fights a process - be it for the process being stupid, tools being slow, incentives do not align with policy, whatever - especially a control step, no amount of mandatory tech enforcement of that process step will yield better results." At best you get garbled data because someone hit the keyboard to fill in mandatory fields, sometimes, the process now works OUTSIDE of the system by informal methods because 'work still needs to be done', at worst, you get a mutiny.

You have to fix the people(s' problems) by actually talking to them and take the pain points away, you do not go to 'computer says no' territory first.

In my experience, no org problem is only social, and no tech problem is merely technical. Finding a sustainable solution in both fields is what distinguishes a staff engineer from a junior consultant.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#55

Post by wombatpm »

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 worked for a fortune 300 company that engaged in a Business Process Redesign initiative. After spending 90 million on the project they pulled the plug.

My takeaway was that the project was doomed because it was named wrong. Should have been called Business Process Design.

They are now owned by Private Equity. I can only wonder what madness the would have wrought with AI.

They tried to implement a system whereby a customer has a single customer number. Between mergers, acquisitions and shutdowns it was impossible to keep straight and keep tracking history. It impacted rates, contracts, sales commissions, division revenue-everything. In they end they gave everyone a new number while still using the old ones.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#56

Post by jjk166 »

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…

Throwing people at a problem is very different from allocating an appropriate head-count of appropriately trained/educated people. A small but skilled team can accomplish a lot, whereas a lot of the wrong people can't do much at all. Generally there are more than enough warm bodies available, big companies are full of those, the issue is that skilled people aren't fungible - the team of 12 working on this project seems to be moving at a snails pace because really it's two people, both of whom are split across several other projects simultaneously, doing the real work and everyone else doing stuff that is likely unnecessary if not straight up counterproductive. It takes skill, effort and discipline to cultivate a team that actually has all the skills it needs to succeed, in the form of people who mutually work well together, to keep these people around over an extended period of time, and not try to split them up onto different projects and plug the gaps with the wrong people.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#57

Post by Telaneo »

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…

Providing the rockstars with a sandbox where they can do anything and work independently, while being shielded from all the processes and paperwork that slow them down (while also having people to pull that slack), is a fairly good method, but depending on the work that isn't viable. Their work has to come out of the sandbox at some point, and there will be some back-and-fourth which will probably put blocks on the team in that case.

I doubt there's much to do about the specific process that can be done to minimise the problems of the rockstars without also causing problems further down the ladder, without just starting to make exceptions like you said. It's probably just an emergent behaviour of processes like this intended to raise average quality. You pull up the bottom floor, but the roof gets lower as a result. You can find similar problems in schooling.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#58

Post by DocTomoe »

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…

I think it is a managerial failure to have rockstar-type employees work the menial, process-managed stuff. Those should work on the unusual, the new, the moonshots. Stuff that has not yet been formalized in BPMN 2.0

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#59

Post by evrydayhustling »

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, or even internal between teams with different taxonomies)

- Your process must support a wild kind of variability that is not worth categorizing (e.g. every kind of special delivery instruction a customer might provide)

Believing you can always solve these with the right taxonomy and process diagram is like believing there is always another manager to complain to. Experienced process design instead pushes semi-structured variability to the edges, acknowledges those edges, and watches them like a hawk for danger.

We should ABSOLUTELY be applying those principles more to AI... if anything, AI should help us decouple systems and overreach less on system scope. We should get more comfortable building smaller, well-structured processes that float in an unstructured soup, because it has gotten much cheaper for us to let every process have an unstructured edge.

Re: It's Always the Process, Stupid

#60

Post by nlawalker »

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…

> Almost every problem a modern corpo has can be solved with an appropriate head-count of appropriately trained/educated people

Not really, because solving those problems with headcount defeats the point. Part of the definition of those kinds of problems is that solutions involving headcount are invalid.

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