Turn Your Business Knowledge
Into Software
Business leaders depend on their most experienced staff for many important decisions that happen every day that are not part of the CRM. Much of that knowledge is tacit knowledge, an idea that was identified by polymath/philosopher Michael Polanyi, who wrote, We can know more than we can tell.
Record expert decisions
Turn them into rules
Build the workflow
Your team can use the method in software.
Codified decision making
Key rules for pricing, underwriting, qualifying, estimating, prioritising and other decisions are often only found in the head(s) of your most experienced staff, in outdated documentation, or in a pricing spreadsheet with too many tabs. When it comes time for the ask Dave question, it’s helpful to have that knowledge codified in a single, auditable place. Especially when Dave is 64.
Codifying key business rules
Business continuity: Capture and codify critical decision making processes before someone quits or retires.
Due diligence: Codified decision making is a plus whether you’re getting audited, being acquired, or acquiring.
Growth: Codify your pricing or underwriting decisions and you can scale the process and eliminate variability and human error.
What can be codified?
We focus on knowledge intensive business decisions that have been made by people for a long time. Examples include qualifying prospects, triaging and routing, pricing/estimating, risk scoring, prioritisation, playbooks, etc. Every industry has several of these operational decision making processes that are ripe for codification. We help you find the right one for your team. Often, we start with a low risk bucket of decisions and prove value before tackling higher stakes decisions. We scope the initial engagement to have clear boundaries so the solution can be implemented, tested, and iterated on to prove value.
How does it work?
We use a combination of AI and our own elicitation model to tease out rules and encode them as a tool that your staff will use in their work. The deliverable can be a quoting app, risk scoring screen, customer onboarding tool, prioritisation tool, or whatever is required to capture the logic. The deliverable is a source of truth for key business rules, can be used to train new employees, and provides auditability for the rules. Here are the broad strokes of our process. We will dig deeper when we hop on a call.
Pick a bucket: We will get the process owner and subject matter experts together and dig into operational decision making processes. Together we will pick the best fit to encode, verify it’s been done before by people, and scope the boundaries.
Elicitation: Tacit knowledge is real and requires an interview model that elicits knowledge through real world scenarios and counterexamples. This is not something you can automate with an LLM today, but a structured interview with an AI model and a human knowledge engineer is highly effective. Your veteran(s) will be engaged in the process. It’s an opportunity to codify what’s been done and have input into the tooling that implements it. It feels good for your veteran(s) to be engaged and respected. It’s not a process where they feel replaced, it’s one where they feel important.
Codification: We will build a small amount of software that implements the elicited rules. We hand over all documentation, code, etc. We have no desire for lock in.
Monthly refinement: Rules change. We build a process where overrides are noted, discussed, and rules are updated accordingly. Your codified knowledge becomes a source of truth.
Get in touch
More questions? Book a call and we’ll figure it out together.