Hacker News Reader

Comment by OldGuyInTheClub | Hacker News Reader

It brought the "swim lane" mentality to my outfit. There is a "process is king" mindset where people exist to run some report or the other with a completely impenetrable abbreviation and set of unmarked mandatory fields also with no intuitive signifcance. Grab the next item on the work list, do your thing, and mark it complete. If some project asks what's required on either end or how to move their need forward, that's not your problem. That project has to divert someone to first figure out the unpublished process and then contact everyone in the chain. If you can't run reports yourself, you're at the mercy of others. And the first rule of SAP is that there is no mercy.

View on HN

> There is a "process is king" mindset where people exist to run some report or the other with a completely impenetrable abbreviation and set of unmarked mandatory fields also with no intuitive signifcance. Grab the next item on the work list, do your thing, and mark it complete.

Those are birth pains as felt from inside. It's a beginning of a new sentient life; your company is acquiring its own mind. You and your coworkers are now just nodes in the network. Individual reports don't make intuitive sense for the same reason a random block of machine code doesn't tell you much about the purpose of a program, or why a random neuron doesn't know what the brain is thinking. You're part of something greater now. You're compute incarnate, the process made flesh. Welcome to the collective. Resistance is futile.

(Honestly though, this applies to many corporations in general; I think SAP is a kind of parasite that thrives off corporate life forms, exploiting popularity as a reproduction vector. After infecting a corporation, SAP keeps it alive and makes it display the signs of infection, which is used to encourage other corporate life forms to get infected themselves.)

> Those are birth pains as felt from inside. It's a beginning of a new sentient life; your company is acquiring its own mind.

Yeah. Kind of like 'Aliens' when one bursts through a chest cavity.

> Those are birth pains as felt from inside. It's a beginning of a new sentient life; your company is acquiring its own mind.

Kind of like the ant colony being sentient but the individual ants not (see Gödel, Escher, Bach).

Process is king in mature industries where profits are extracted from scale and volume. Anything outside of standard process is expensive. If there is no external entity to bear the cost, then this cost is to be minimised.

You and I may not agree with this approach, and the formula is somewhat different for creative industries, but numbers don't lie. It's always a compromise between agility/adaptability and cost when in a production line.

A main function of an ERP system like SAP is to maximise this extraction.

And now you have a company incapable of evolving in any meaningful way. The company will die with its current line of products.

Rather with it's current way of doing business. But yes, in a way you're right.

Unless incumbents are not susceptible to shakeups, like when that business is within for instance extraction of oil

Or a hospital

Or a drug manufacturer

> with no intuitive signifcance

This isn't a problem with a standardized process, this is a problem with leadership not explaining to those doing the work how they fit into the whole and why their actions are important.

"Process driven" does not have to mean rote, mindless, automaton-like action. It should be more about thoughtful action conscious of how those actions have downstream effects rather than intuitive "do what feels right" methods

this requires trust in the workers from the C-level. But they can't hire people they can trust, because they are paying minimal wage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com