Humans are messy. Humans work outside of whatever system you create. You can codify all your things all you want, it simply will not capture the operational complexity of a business run by humans.
The problem needs to be flipped on its head. LLMs give us the capacity to do just that. It's far more accurate to analyze what the humans are doing, note deviations and follow up on those where regulatory compliance is required. This captures both written processes as well as their practical implementations.
You're on a tech news website as a reminder.
I've used to do something like this, on a smaller scale and dubbed it "organization as code". As long as you have good enough providers for Terraform/Pulumi you can declaratively specify a lot of the interconnected stuff in a company.
I built this around GitHub as the indentity provider as my interest was declaratively defining repository access control, while also being able to use users public ssh keys to (re)provision services to get them access automatically.
For the latter, we already have policy-as-code tooling that actually works.
[1] "A Universal Lemma For Compliance" https://blog.eutopian.io/a-universal-lemma-for-compliance/
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[1] <https://www.geldata.com>
IMHO, the main issues are cultural, and culture change is hard once an org is established. Even new companies will face issues, because business culture at large gets carried forward through people and interactions. Good luck getting execs to learn and conform to anything, they're too busy emailing confidential Microsoft Office docs to unauthorized third parties.
Computers have the ability to provide wonderful features like transparency and accountability to orgs and business processes, but just like security, we typically choose not to invest in those areas unless forced. Perhaps AI will enable some change by providing a generic interface that brokers interactions between humans and the organization itself, analyzing all inputs before forwarding to a destination.
Um.” Manfred finds it, floating three tiers down an elaborate object hierarchy. It’s flashing for attention. There’s a priority interrupt, an incoming lawsuit that hasn’t propagated up the inheritance tree yet. He prods at the object with a property browser. “I’m afraid I’m not a director of that company, Mr. Glashwiecz. I appear to be retained by it as a technical contractor with nonexecutive power, reporting to the president, but frankly, this is the first time I’ve ever heard of the company. However, I can tell you who’s in charge if you want.” “Yes?” The attorney sounds almost interested. Manfred figures it out; the guy’s in New Jersey. It must be about three in the morning over there. Malice—revenge for waking him up—sharpens Manfred’s voice. “The president of http://agalmic.holdings .root.184.97.AB5 is http://agalmic.holdings .root.184.97.201. The secretary is http://agalmic.holdings .root.184.D5, and the chair is http://agalmic.holdings .root.184.E8.FF. All the shares are owned by those companies in equal measure, and I can tell you that their regulations are written in Python. Have a nice day, now!”
This article reminds me of another book [1] called Holacracy where how a business is run is systematized according to other pre-defined principles. David Allen, a productivity trainer, used it at his own company for several years before eventually moving away from it because the ongoing overhead to keep its system up was too much.
I wonder if this system will end up like that as well. I love the idea, but I think humans operate at a squishier level than our computers do, there's a risk of 'massive bureaucratic dehumanization and inflexible processes' and the Iron Law of Organizations that make such efforts as that book and this article fraught with peril. Taylorism has its limits.
But hey, if this works, I'll be excited to see more businesses adopting better practices and less painful fumbling around trying to do practices in an organic or unplanned way.
[1] https://www.holacracy.org/blog/dac-ceo-reflects-on-holacracy...
(that, and the notion of Exocortex, which is what I've named some of my smartphones...)