The Biology of Knowledge - by Max J. Pucher

Synopsis:
Max J. Pucher, Chief Architect of ISIS Papyrus, defines himself as an IT philosopher and argues the
point that many corporations find it very hard to define what their needs in terms of process
management are. “Each document represents a process - says Max J. Pucher - and the process is
equal to the document. ”

In a humorous sideline Max J. Pucher considers that it is impossible to exactly describe those IT
process needs, because of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. In 1927, Heisenberg states that
the simultaneous determination of two related quantities, for example the position and momentum
of a particle, has an unavoidable uncertainty. This is the reason why we are unable to encode our
daily corporate work into rigid rules, programming- or otherwise.
He suggests further that the inability to deal with today’s complexity in IT creates a fear of failure and
thus causes a tendency to conform to non-documented standards.
Information Technology gets more and more complex and causes a situation where the ability to
evolve with our needs – and in fact to innovate - is lost, because new technology can obviously not
conform to old technology standards.

He explains that this is a situation that he faces at most corporations. “I can’t change your company
- says Mr. Pucher - but you can.” He requests that the vicious cycle of rising complexity of old-style
programming – caused by the large IT companies - has come to an end.

The Human Aspect of IT
Max J. Pucher offers another insight into his vision by talking about the human needs of IT.
Applications have to be created for the people who use it, the individual users, clerks and operators
who struggle with government rules, management decisions, and customer service expectations
every day.

Workflow proponents suggest that these process requirements can be encoded into RULES, which
would thus improve the overall performance and quality of work performed. Pucher proposes that
hard-coded rules cannot be used to control or improve human interaction because of the pattern
matching and emotional functionality of the human brain. Pucher references brain-scientist Antonio
Damasio, who discovered that human decisions are prepared by the rational mind but the final
decision is an emotional one. Emotions can not be encoded into programs.

Antonio Damasio’s discovery is so essential for IT that Max Pucher is writing a book on the subject,
to be published later in 2006. He proposes that a radical shift is needed to avoid further outsourcing
of IT to low-cost countries. Large scale IT outsourcing is only a quick-and-dirty solution to the cost
spiral of programming.

He claims that it is necessary to create a new paradigm of knowledge systems. A knowledge
system does not contain data or information, but must use existing information patterns to suggest
a course of action that will lead to a desired business result. Such systems do not exist today. IT
does not have to make a choice between programming and human decision making and suggests
that many document and business processes are a combination of coded rules and intuitive
human decisions.

Dynamic Process Assembly
Max J. Pucher introduces the concept of Dynamic Process Assembly. He proposes a solution
based on a Repository where all the data and information structures of a corporation are modelled.
This enables the encoding of the rules that are known and makes dynamic processes simple to
create and maintain. For the process decisions that are intuitive and can not be hard-coded, he
proposes a User-Trained-Agent, based on machine learning software that collects decision pattern
information as the user works. After a training phase the User-Trained-Agent executes the boring
and repetitive jobs, and makes more time for those difficult decisions.

This is a concept that allows for continuous evolution of an IT system and breaks the expensive
vicious cycle of analysis-coding-test-rollout-monitoring. Pucher is convinced that this approach can
dramatically reduce the implementation time of complex process support systems. Once in use, the
system will continuously be improved by the way the users work with it.

It will be interesting to see how old-style It, will deal with a dramatic shift in technology as the one
proposed by Pucher. But something will have to happen …