Sten Vesterli's Blog

Making IT Live up to its Promise

Tag: People

Learning From People, Not From Documents

IT Leadership, , ,

Implementing AI has a critical and often-overlooked problem that Raman Shah just reminded me of in another discussion: It can only learn what is documented.

When you teach an AI to perform a process in your organization, you train it on all the internal documents you have. But these describe the RAW – Rules As Written. They do not describe the RAU – Rules As Used.

It takes a lot of care to do process discovery properly. You need to have a human being interview the people doing the work to find out how business is actually done.

Work-to-rule is a classic form of industrial action where workers do exactly what they’re told in order to stop production without going on strike. If you train an AI on just your documents, you are asking it for a work-to-rule stoppage.

Business knowledge beats technical skill

IT Leadership, ,

Business knowledge is more valuable than technical skill. I see again and again that organizations get rid of experienced IT people because they don’t have the latest buzzwords on their CVs. They are replaced with offshore resources or eager young things who tick all the boxes and cost less.

That is a misguided strategy. It takes a long time to accumulate business knowledge because it is not, and cannot be, taught. Someone who has been in the organization for years knows how the business works. That gives them context to interpret requirements and build software that matches how the business really works. A new hire without that knowledge can only build what is written in the spec, which rarely matches what the business needs.

Your technology changes much faster than your business. If you keep hiring new people every time you decide to switch to the latest and greatest technology (AI, anyone?), your people will never have more than 2 or 3 years of business knowledge.

If you need to change technology, it is a much better approach to hire one expert on the new tech and have that person teach your experienced employees. Don’t throw away decades of experience. You’ll miss it when it’s gone.