Welcome to Tectastic, the podcast that explores the cutting edge world of technology and its impact on society. New breakthroughs and developments are revolutionized the world around us, presenting exciting opportunities as well as complex challenges. We'll explore the big ideas and key players driving these transformation as we seek to understand the implications of these advancements for our lives, our communities, and our planet.
Join us on this journey of discovery and exploration as we navigate the fascinating and ever evolving world of technology. This is tictastic. Hammer Droschak, welcome Bay. It's techtastic. It is lovely to have you here. Thank you for having me. So I was looking through your profile before got here.
And you have a company that tries to help others be more efficient in their business process, reducing wasteful activity by providing them with innovative tools Did you help the audience understand exactly what you guys are trying to solve? Yeah. Absolutely. So business process improvement is a very large domain of expertise. Indeed.
It's basically if you're a business and you have a process, whichever business does, you generally want to be able to improve to increase efficiency, reduce costs, you know, whatever your business objective, it falls under this domain. Now, everyone's talking oh, let's do business process work, let's do process science, process improvement. It's still very immature. The tools and the methodologies that are out there, especially when you're thinking about for the digital space.
So our company is creating new tools. We're infusing those tools with opinions, tried and true methodology. We're trying to create more accessibility. So that any size company in any industry can engage more meaningfully in process improvement because we're lowering that learning curve. So hopefully that's another mouthful, but it helps find out a bit. It does. It is a very broad statement though. I mean, like, business process could be sales focused. It could be in technology development.
It could be operations piece, if you do fulfillment or or whatever, there's a lot there. So I tend to think of there being, like, there's the input side. There's the I'm using tools. There's an outcome we desire, and there's KPIs that maybe we track against that outcome that we desire. We hope that those align. And then there's now I'm going to improve the process somewhere. Like, the KPIs aren't being met, or there's, clearly a problem.
I have 400 outbound calls and only 5 leads generated by it, and I should be getting one for every 50 is the metric maybe I care about. Right? So there's a lot that you can cover in there, and there's a lot of different entry points like that person you're helping. Do you think of it from the that executive level so that they have good visibility into how whole things operating can know where to focus their time, or are you entering at some other point in the organization?
Yeah. It's a great question. So I'll tackle it from what you just described, like, the example of, let's say, every process has measures and then metrics and then ultimately Cape targets to hit so that you know your process is working well or not. If you're going to try to manage that process, either to change it, to improve it, to, let's say, enhance technology, to describe it to an executive.
Whatever your goal is, there's a set of activities you have to do to identify what the process is, to document it, to be able to the underlying process work is what is my So to your question about, well, is it for executives? Is it for people in the pit? It really could be for a number of reasons, but I'd say the target audience is the people who actually need to work with the process meaningfully.
And that could be doing the work to identify what the process is, the details around the process, the base measures of the process, And that could be for executive communication. It also could be past that point where the executive I was already said, yes, I need to work on this process. So it could be for that person to actually start doing analysis, to do requirements gathering, whatever it is. But no matter what you're looking at, everything is processed at the end of the day.
That's one of the things we like to say. If it's in motion, it can be described with process data, but we need better tools to be able to capture that data, to analyze it, to be able to communicate it. And that's really where our focus is. It's a very foundational level. One of the hardest parts in process improvement in any organization, like, a lot of times, the company will stand up a process improvement team. Like, it might be the operations improvement team.
And your point about, like, the first thing is understanding that there's a process there and getting good data about it. The entry point of that is really interesting, right, because either you're integrating with existing tools. There's the sales tool. There's the CRM for the customer support team. There's an ERP or whatever. That can give you information about maybe the outcomes of activities.
But where do you get the understanding of the activity itself and how much efforts being put into something? Right. And this is where in an age where everything is automation, artificial intelligence, digitization, the answer is very basic. Which is you still have to go on the floor. You still have to talk to the people. You still have to actually elicit that process requirement set in a very manual way. Because if you think about what is a process, a process is a intention.
It's a design so that people and technology, especially nowadays, it's always gonna be people and technology enable that process. But like you said, if you're just watching the technology outcomes or the data coming on technology, that's a very small piece of the puzzle. How do the people in the organization actually interact with that technology? How does everything come together to form a process?
The only way to get that data accurately is still to do the proverbial Hammer walk from lean, but in the digital world, it's talking to people. It's sitting at their desks, asking them what they're doing, what is the sequence, getting all the steps in order that's really the only way it can still be done, in my professional opinion. And a former employer during COVID, we were flying all around the world going to each one of our, big distribution centers.
And the only way we were able to find the kinks in the supply chain were to do exactly that, to walk around, talk to people, hey. I see that you're doing this right now. How often would you say you do this? And you you get an understanding and they're like, oh, we actually have a problem here. This one location for some reason has this one doc that can't be used. And so people are manually moving things from here to there because the machines are taking it there instead where it should go.
Things like that. Right? Even in the in the fully digital world that a lot of us feel like we live in. There's so much manual activity that still happens to bring workflows together. You could give people a very, very top of the line system suite and a full tech stack for everything they need to do. And I guarantee 80% of it still held together by phone calls, meetings, emails, slacks, and that's that's not really tracked.
So if you're trying to, like, take the date out of your systems and reverse engineer what the process is, you'll never get to it. And people have been doing you know, for now a decade where you're process mining, you're taking these big datasets, all this data. But the simple fact is it's too complex what people do hold processes together.
And like you said, the manual work, the work arounds, the gap fixes that people just come up with on the fly, you have to go and you have to investigate, you have to do that research. And if you want to do the research properly, you need method and you need tools. And again, that's sort of where our focus is, helping people get to that stage, where they feel empowered to do this work in a consistent and an accurate way. So I could imagine in a complex supply.
So previous company was trade lands, global chain, connecting all the ocean carriers, the rail shippers, and all that kind of fun stuff. But everybody had their own process. Everybody called things different things along the way, when you're trying to be a digital platform that sits in the middle of that, unifying that view of what's happening is a necessity of the technology. You have to be able to describe it in a uniform way. But the reality was a lot of that just simply wasn't true.
You would have to make assumptions, and then you would have to add information in to say, okay. In this instance, in this location, Like, for instance, in Africa, when you're doing this particular activity, there's going to be this step where you have to bribe some official. That in no place, Elsa, we're gonna actually document that. But if you don't do it appropriately, it'll sit in quarantine for 6 months.
That reality is something that you don't know until you're out and asking Christian, but to your point about, like, having good tools about it, what is a good tool that allows you to figure that out and see that look like. And that's a deep question. So a lot of I love it because you've been out there and you've pain of trying to actually figure out what a process is. But the, the thing is, let me start with this.
The first thing that makes a good tool is that it can help structure a consistent viewpoint. And this is what is not really happening in the industry today. So what I mean is If you think about what do people map process in, what do people draw process diagrams in? It's a lot of open whiteboard canvas apps today. You've got loose cards, you have Miro, you have Miro, you have, you have a plethora of options.
But the problem with those is it's just a blank page, and you have to create the language every time that you try to structure that data. So what happens is everyone I use all the database shapes, so I get it deep in the weeds and this and that. So the problem is there's no comparable data because there's no standard and there's no structure.
So I'm explaining the the state of the market because the first thing that we believe makes a good tool in this space is it has to be constrained so that when I make a process data set, and you make a process data set using the same tool, it's going to be someone at the same detail level with the same data structure so that that data becomes comparable and we can start to actually build knowledge that that can be shared across different people.
And like you said, if it's a big company and you're taking process data from all over the world in different locations, even within that same project, you need people to be able to write process the same way. So in some ways, just having a standard opinion, is a big part of what makes a good tool. And then I could go further into what that opinion should include, and that gets a little more technical But basically, you know, the summary point is here is process is actually infinite.
If I was gonna describe a process, it's that sort of proverbial, describe the elephant. You can only look at it from one angle at a time. Yeah. And everyone could Hammer a different viewpoint, but that's how it is. Reality is extremely complex. So how do you actually fix a viewpoint, you have to start somewhere. So otherwise, all the data is just random and it can't build on each other.
So there's a lot of challenges, but that hopefully that gives you a little bit of an intro to what makes a good tool. There's a lot we can go into there. Yeah. So there's a parallel between process and software because, ultimately, I think all software is just process automation. All it's trying to do is take something that's not human being used to do and let the computer try to do it for you.
Yeah. And until we started having a very common way of sharing our, like, what does an interaction with the user look like? What is the, you know, what are all these different things and being opinion at about it, our tools all kinda sucked. And now everything's fairly standardized. It's very easy to hop from one order to another to draw the same diet grams that are the same architecture. Everybody gets it. That's a great starting point.
Why do you think that it's taken so long for, first of all, for process improve it to become top of mind to so many companies, and therefore, for tools to become standardized and to be strongly opinionated. Yeah. I I think a big part of it is we have to zoom out for a second and understand that the massive digitization we've been seeing is a very new thing. Maybe last 10, 15, 20 years, if you wanna be generous. Process work hasn't been prioritized like it is today.
Because in the past, you could still engage your tactile senses for the most part. You could walk into an office and watch what people are doing. Things were manual enough where you could still engage your common sense to see of this person is idle. This obviously doesn't make sense. There's paper stacked at the ceiling. You know, it's it's like you said, you can walk into a factory floor and see oil spilling on the floor. Yes. And see things going wrong.
Now there has been a massive shift to digitization, decentralization, globalization, processes. There's no way to see them anymore. If I'm a middle manager or even an executive and I say what's going on right now in the process, the process could be all over the world. And if there's no documentation and not a single viewpoint, nobody knows what's going on. No one can fix problems. No one can analyze anything.
So all of a sudden, and it's just now in the last decade where people were saying, I need process diagrams. I need process data. I need to know what is happening in my business, and they're finding it's difficult. There's not a lot of experts who can actually map process effectively. It costs efficiently. All the perspectives are different. There's no standard languages that make any sense. So, you know, why now?
It's it's just happening now where this is becoming a massive and that problem is scaling rapidly, especially as people want more software. They want more automation. They want artificial intelligence. You can't do any of that effectively unless you understand your base requirements. And people are struggling. So that's a little bit of why now and what's going on. Yeah. So you're also the author of a book called becoming a conscious business.
I'm really curious That sounds like it's a how to be a more thoughtful business. Is that even close to on the mark? So my book, you know, the risk of outing myself is very eccentric. It's more focused on becoming a self aware business and how humans are actually evolving into businesses and businesses are a different class conscious organism.
So in my book, I describe this relationship between you as a process and when you start collaborating with colleagues, how that becomes a collective and then you reform systems. So it's kind of a commentary on the patterns of process and how it ladders into increasingly complex forms. That'll just that's like the small synopsis there. Well, I'm curious about that because it it maps towards I've had conversations with people about, the concept of humans being tribal. For example, I go to Europe.
I look European. Right? So I don't distinguish myself from the larger group, but if I find other Americans, I will tend to gravitate towards them because we have the most in common, and there's, like, a critical mass of people that once we get beyond that, we start looking for exclusionary reasons And if it's less than that, we look for reasons to include. And depending on the environment that you're in, that could be far more selective.
So, like, that same American back in the States, I might gravitate towards people, be live on the East Coast that are West Coast based because that's their cultural center that they have more in common, less occlusion. So companies as organization are one form of that.
And within that organization, you still have divisions and the various org structures themselves that people tend to tour And so the idea of it as a conscious organism almost plays into that, like, each org as organ kind of view of that. It may even close to what you're trying to describe. It's a pretty open topic and pretty more so. I think so. Like, part of what you're saying is in a way humans generally We're programmed to aggregate into group structures that can activate us.
So part of what I hear you saying is, you know, as a human, you sometimes find blank groups, like can be based on the context of where you are geographically, what's going on. But generally, we, like most of the organisms in the world, we form complexes so we can be effective so we can create more complex things. Humans more so than a lot of the rest of the animals.
And a lot of forming businesses is finding your tribe, finding multiple tribes, finding places where you can amplify your effort, amplify your energy, and channel it into something that you can create that's bigger than what you could do alone. If you look at the pattern of, of how we become productive and fulfilled humans, everyone feels this pull to a certain extent to try to aggregate and form something more complicated So that's part of the conversation.
I think what you're describing is part of that conversation. It it's interesting because I tended to think of it as a comfort thing. People are looking for a sense of a belonging, sir, and that belonging is more about that first level of safety. I have air. I have water. I have food, and I'm safe. And then there's the fulfillment piece that comes on top of that. Can we do more together?
But in a in a way, the food safety shelter piece in today's world is so abstracted away from our actual needs and most of what the people we'd be talking to, right, we can do more in market piece becomes a lot more of the safety food water aspect, right? Like, as a company, we're not successful. Therefore, I don't need tomorrow. Yeah. That isn't the instinct of it.
I would argue that in Maslow's hierarchy, for instance, let's say a 1000 years ago, 95% of your energy could be spent, even in a group to secure those basic needs and actualization, like becoming actualized as a human and becoming more creatively fulfilled, you didn't have much energy for and in modern society, it's kind of flipped, right? You might spend 5% of your energy, securing food, shelter, groups that you can belong to. Everything is more accessible and connected.
So it's actually more of an intellectual burden and a spiritual burden now because 95% of your energy is left for actualization, creative expression, manifesting something in the world. And then that that's where there's a lot of room to do incredible things in modern society, and there's also a lot of room too fumble around in that space and lose yourself and not know what's going on and just remain unconscious.
And that's why this concept of, like you said, becoming more conscious is how do we become more conscious? Connectivity is one way to become more conscious, reconnecting with our nature. There's a lot of different ways. And and then we sort of bridge into more of a sphere philosophical conversation. So that that can be a fun one, but maybe for another time. Sam, it's been a great conversation.
And I love what you're doing, and the book I'm gonna check it out just because I think really, really interesting to me. If people wanted to check out truvie, dotcom, where's the best place to go check out your product? Yep. Truvie.com. And we're a few weeks away from going live on our first product. So with us, yeah. You can sign up for the email list if you'd like. And in general, if you're interested in mapping or process data capture or structuring.
You can reach me at samdrawshack on linkedinsamattruple.com. I'm the only drawshack out there So if you just punch and draw a Shack anywhere you can find me, please reach out. I'd love to hear from you. And that's a wrap for this episode of Tectastic. I wanna thank you personally for joining us, and we'll see you next time. Until then, keep exploring, and stay curious. Hey there, tech Christian. Is your team drowning in tech Christian you just wish got a magic button to fix it.
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