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It’s not about the bike: Difference between revisions
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Look, exercise is important, but it is something one should do alone, anonymously, under cover of darkness if possible, and in disguise if not. | Look, exercise is important, but it is something one should do alone, anonymously, under cover of darkness if possible, and in disguise if not. | ||
So when the question arises ''how should one improve athletic performance'' the [[JC]] is, well — the sixth-last person in the world you should ask. | So when the question arises ''how should one improve athletic performance'' the [[JC]] is, well — the sixth-last person in the world you should ask. | ||
But he has a fondness for metaphors<ref>And pies.</ref> and he spies a good ’un here. For the same principles that would apply to elite performance, were he to care a fig for it, assuredly apply to any other kind of process optimisation, and he cares quite a few figs about that. | |||
So, to co-opt Lance Armstrong’s words, but with a JC twist: | |||
{{Quote|''It’s not about the bike. It’s about the '''pies'''.''}} | {{Quote|''It’s not about the bike. It’s about the '''pies'''.''}} | ||
If you want to go drop some weight and go faster, there are two ways to do it: drop twenty grand on | If you want to go drop some weight and go faster, there are two ways to do it: drop twenty grand on after-market kevlar fork upgrades, graphene spokes and go-faster stripes — or just ''lay off the pies''. | ||
What has this to do with legal [[design]]? | |||
Well, your legal process is, like the JC, an opinionated windbag who complains a lot, does no-one any good and can’t run for toffee. That is why you are trying to fix it. (If it already moves like Usain Bolt, why are you fiddling with it?) | |||
In that case, throwing fancy tech at it would be like the [[JC]] dropping thirty grand on a Pinarello ''Dogma'' and some Day-Glo spandex. | |||
Time for another | Time for another home made [[Latin]] [[maxim]], readers: ''[[primum comede minus]]'': “[[First, cut out the pies]].” You will lose ten kilos and ''save'' money — on pies, right? — ''and your current gear will work a lot better''. Get in shape first. ''Then'' figure out if you need a new bike. | ||
===Dieting sucks but getting new kit is fun=== | ===Dieting sucks but getting new kit is fun=== | ||
And here our old friend the [[agency paradox]] rears its head, and the selfish motivations it imbues in those in the sedimentary layer above your head. All the incentives will be skewed in favour of fancy new kit. | |||
To these people innovating, for the sake of it, is where it is at. [[CEO|Hank]], the [[CEO]], has told all his directs they ''have'' to innovate. There’s a five-year plan — it may even be officially ''called'' a “five-year plan” — to convert a third of the workforce into gig-working [[School-leaver from Bucharest|Bratislavan school-leavers]] by 2026. So [[General counsel|Chip]], the [[GC]], is screaming at whoever is in {{Sex|his}} line of sight to ''do'' something — ''anything'' — to, like ''digitise'', and while, as usual, there’s no money to do anything, by a stroke of otherworldly provenance, there ''is'' a ring-fenced, bottomless fund for projects that can be badged as [[innovation]]. | |||
Before you can say “[[blockchain]]” Chip will be all over it. To hell with the business case; ''make it happen''. Good luck pointing out that it would be better to fix your processes first. | |||
And even if you do make that case, and it carries the day, putting processes on a cabbage-and-water diet is ''hard''. The thing about broken processes is that they are broken in unfathomable, illogical, unpredictable, hard-to-fix ways. They have become progressively ''more'' broken over the aeons, as barnacles have clustered, rust has not slept, and critical knowledge has been lost to posterity. | |||
A team in Ops in Southampton will be mindlessly following some routine they inherited from legal in 1995, even though it became obsolete in 2004, and no-one thought to stop them. Your precedents, such as they are, will be all over the shop and shot through with contradictions, outrages and gnomic textual formulations that no-one understands, no-one can recall the provenance of, but everyone is terrified of removing. | |||
Getting to grips with that job will require someone with unlimited expertise, patience, time, energy and fascination learning anachronistic minutiae for the simple pleasure of then erasing them. | |||
We [[legal eagle]]<nowiki/>s are odd, but not many of us are ''that'' odd. No wonder no-one can be bothered. But we ''need'' to be bothered. Order in a skip and hire a chainsaw for the weekend. This is going to be fun. | |||
===If you can automate it, it can’t be important=== | ===If you can automate it, it can’t be important=== | ||
Anything you automate is, necessarily, low value: because you ''make it'' low value ''by automating it''. | A great misconception about digitisation — even successful digitisation — is that it will delivers enduring value that will accrue in perpetuity to the bottom line. But it does not. It ''cannot''. Anything you automate is, necessarily, low value: because you ''make it'' low value ''by automating it''. | ||
Automating might give you a short-term productivity bump, but you’ll rapidly bank it and, anyway, if ''you'' can automate a process, so can anyone else. And then there are the downstream costs. Not just the [[Rent-seeking|rent extracted]] by the software vendor, the internal bureaucratic overhead in maintaining, auditing, approving and renewing the software, training legal users, updating the content — the knock-on pain of solving a problem which wasn’t, actually, that you needed Kevlar forks, but that ''you needed to go on a diet and get in shape''. | Automating might give you a short-term productivity bump, but you’ll rapidly bank it and, anyway, if ''you'' can automate a process, so can anyone else. And then there are the downstream costs. Not just the [[Rent-seeking|rent extracted]] by the software vendor, the internal bureaucratic overhead in maintaining, auditing, approving and renewing the software, training legal users, updating the content — the knock-on pain of solving a problem which wasn’t, actually, that you needed Kevlar forks, but that ''you needed to go on a diet and get in shape''. | ||
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All other things being equal, the optimum amount of technology to have in a given situation is ''none''. Tech necessarily adds complication, cost and confusion. Therefore your first question is: how will technology improve the situation. Ask not just in terms of reduced ''cost'' but reduced ''waste''. | All other things being equal, the optimum amount of technology to have in a given situation is ''none''. Tech necessarily adds complication, cost and confusion. Therefore your first question is: how will technology improve the situation. Ask not just in terms of reduced ''cost'' but reduced ''waste''. | ||
{{Sa}} | {{Sa}} | ||
*[[Why is reg tech so disappointing?]] | *[[Why is reg tech so disappointing?]] | ||