Codifying Intelligence

By: Michael Gaccioli, COO, Managing Partner

What a marvelous question and statement! Unfortunately, this type of question and response can only originate from being free from the constraints of your day to day tasks. Free to think, imagine and create. This is the question and statement that has started our journey towards better solutions and perhaps even AI.
As part of the management team at Beta-Tech Inc. it is our job to ensure that we have the proper systems and tools, and more importantly, the right people in place to ensure all our team members can do their job as efficiently as possible. The challenge is not getting trapped in a stagnate approach to project and task execution or completion. With project schedules needing to be maintained and task deadlines to meet, we often look to our past to find the appropriate process or solution to today’s tasks that need to be completed. The repetitive pattern of starting and completing tasks that we have always used keeps us in a safe place and doesn’t allow much in the way of creative thinking, but what if you could break that cycle and change that paradigm of workflow?

How does a company break that cycle and instill a creative approach to everyday work? Well, first you must be prepared to get uncomfortable with thinking differently. When we change the way we do things we ultimately increase our cognitive load beyond what we prefer because we like simplicity and no complications. We like routine and that is the enemy to creative thinking and innovation, but in that routine lies the partial solution to innovation or at least that is what we have found. Secondly, you need to create a space where people can challenge the ‘status quo’ and where barriers to a different way of thinking are removed so that creativity can flourish. You need to ask those in your organization that all important question, ‘…but what if it was possible?’ What comes next is nothing short of amazing.

One of the key industries we serve has a continued demand for better, cheaper, and a more efficient approach to projects and when you are stuck in the old, repetitive way of thinking, you can’t see how you can possibly do more with less. What we did at Beta-Tech was work to change that paradigm and talk with all our project team members in a group setting, based on a particular project or discipline. We talked about how we could have done things on that project differently. This would sound pretty typical for anyone with project experience, but what made this one different is that we had develop two simple, but elegant tools to help streamline our work on recent projects. These tools were meant to remove the mundane and repetitive tasks that required a “brute force” approach to our work while needing 100% accuracy. Not an easy feat for sure. As a basis of reference “brute force” was as simple as search, copy/paste, format, cross reference to a database and organize more than 30,000 records. The other was a bit more complex requiring the identification of the relationships between 1.4 million cross reference data points.

We asked the team what task(s) took the most time? What task(s) had to be repeated due to uncertainty or doubt about correctness? What was the most complex task they had to do? Then we asked the questions, how do we reduce the time to complete the task(s)? How do we remove that doubt you have about correctness? How do we automate those complex tasks? The response…. “you can’t”, well not easily they said. But then the follow-up question, “but what if it was possible?” You see, you have to allow people to think way outside of the box, even to the point of crazy ideas…okay, maybe not that far, but you have to stretch your mind and your teams minds, so we dove deeper.

In Q2 of 2020, we started discussing the patterns and repetition in tasks all the while thinking about how our mind processes these patterns and the associated work. Next, we considered the syntax that a computer would need to do the same thing. In other words we “codified intelligence” in that we took the rules that we would apply, our intelligence, and codified that into software so it can be executed at scale and speed. We had to determine how we could apply mathematical and decision-making formula(e) to develop a solution that allowed for efficiency. The biggest stumbling block for our team to overcome was the belief that the solution had to be 100% effective. Here is the secret of this way of thinking….it doesn’t need to be perfect! Nothing that has ever been built, designed, engineered, or completed has been developed in one iteration. We needed to convince our team that if we can get 10%, 20%, or greater improvement in work efficiency, we have been successful.

What spawned from these conversations was that elusive shift in thinking and creativity. The impossible was now possible. New approaches to problem solving started to be presented along with new ideas of what we could streamline. From there we went to work developing intelligent applications and code to help work through these new ideas. We’ve applied those mathematical solutions and human/computer syntax to our code and ultimately, have created one of the best set of tools we could have imagined for not only improving our efficiency, but to benefit our clients in overall improved project performance. What we’ve enabled in our people and created in our tools is a stepping stone along the way to AI, to something that could adapt its intelligence and problem solving capability, taking us further along the AI road.
Did we accomplish what we set out to do? Can we attain our industries demand for better, cheaper, and a more efficient projects? We believe the answers to these questions is absolutely! After we released these tools on four small/medium sized projects near the end of 2020 we saw savings in key project areas of 30% – 40% in both time and cost! But what delights us most is we have improved our approach to problem solving, enhanced our team’s way of thinking about problems and have helped remove barriers to creative problem solving.
And so can you.

Being innovative isn’t hallowed ground owned by anyone. It’s being able to think differently and to allow yourself the time to imagine different possibilities and solutions that can be applied to everyday problems or, in our case, the repetitive or complex tasks within projects.
Allow yourself to think differently and challenge the status-quo. Ask that question, “….what if it was possible?” Then watch what you can accomplish!