Tag: Technology
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The Cost of Cheap Code
This is part of The New Cost of Everything, a five-part series on what AI is actually changing. Post 1 has the foundational framework. I subscribe to a newsletter called The Rundown AI. It covers major AI announcements — new models, product launches, capability updates — five days a week. On a typical Tuesday: Zuckerberg’s…
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Measure Once, Cut Twice?
This is part of The New Cost of Everything, a five-part series on what AI is actually changing — and what it isn’t. Each post stands alone. The argument compounds if you read all five. Start at Post 1 for the foundational framework. Three paths companies are taking with AI and headcount — and why…
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Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Greenfield: The Three Tiers of AI Value
This is part of The New Cost of Everything, a five-part series on what AI is actually changing — and what it isn’t. 1 I spend a lot of time reading about and talking to people about AI. Most of those conversations follow the same arc. Someone describes a tool they’ve started using. They tell…
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I Got Eight Weeks of Analysis Done in an Afternoon.
A Practitioner’s Guide to VSM and VSA in Knowledge Work Eleven months after launching a new expense approval system, I discovered that Stage 2 — the gap between Finance approval and Payables processing — was eating more than half of total cycle time. The bottleneck wasn’t the approval chain. It was the queue after approval.…
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Building a Finance Approval System From Scratch
We Built a System So We Wouldn’t Fly Blind Anymore. In late 2023, we identified a problem with how our finance team processed expense reimbursements, cash advances, and petty cash requests. The process worked… most of the time. But it was tenuous. Approvals happened in email, which meant requests sometimes got lost, went to the…
Jeff Beaumont 