Blog · Aliso Digital
Practical thinking on digital transformation, process, documentation and the people side of change.
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Ask 4 people to describe a process they work on daily. You’ll get 4 different answers. The instinct is to treat that as a problem, something to resolve quickly so you can get on with the map. It isn’t a problem. It’s the most valuable thing you’ll find on the
You can teach someone the mechanics of a knowledge base in an afternoon. Spaces, page templates, permissions, a sensible folder structure. Within a few weeks, a capable person can build something that looks organised, professional, ready to fill. That’s the easy 20%. The other 80% is getting the actual content
There’s a familiar moment on transformation projects. The maps are finished. They’re clean, colour-coded, signed off by the steering committee. Everyone agrees the new process makes sense. Then go-live arrives, and someone in the operations team asks a simple question. “Okay, but what do I actually click?” The map can’t
You can teach BPMN 2.0 to a competent graduate in a fortnight. Tasks, gateways, events, pools, lanes. Give them 3 months on a real program, they’ll be modelling processes as well as anyone. The notation was never the scarce skill. What’s scarce is someone who can take a group of
There’s always someone arguing documentation can wait until after go live. The logic is hard to fault in a planning meeting. The system isn’t finished. Screens are still changing. Why write procedures against something that’ll look different in 6 weeks. Then go live arrives, the team moves onto the next
There’s always someone announcing that AI writing is slop. Usually in a comment, usually with some variation of “you can always tell”. I read a lot of those. What strikes me isn’t the argument, since the argument is mostly aesthetic. It’s how familiar the shape of it is. Every significant
Ask most people what a business analyst does and you’ll get an answer about documentation. Writing specs, keeping the traceability matrix current, running things through a change control process. That’s the visible part. The part that actually determines whether a program lands is much less visible, which is sitting with
Most organisations have plenty of documentation. What they don’t have is documentation anyone opens twice. The difference between a work instruction that gets used, versus one that gets written then forgotten, usually comes down to a handful of decisions made before anyone starts typing. Here’s what those decisions look like,
There’s a moment in most process workshops where you notice someone hasn’t spoken. 40 minutes in, everyone else has contributed, they haven’t said a word. The easy read is that they’re not interested. Usually that’s wrong. More often they’re managing something you can’t see from the front of the room.
