Is It Digital, Or Is It Intelligent?

 

I recall seeing one definition or aspect of human intelligence described as the ability to identify analogous situations to those presently encountered, and being able to appropriately adjust known strategies from those analogous situations to derive an effective response or strategy to the new, novel one. Assuming this assertion is at least partially accurate (and I believe it is), it leads to quite the conundrum when it comes to artificial intelligence, or even the impacts of digital transformations (ProjectManagement.com’s theme for February). Recall that the root of all digital transformation is the bit. Computers exclusively use the bit to perform all calculations and evaluations, with no exceptions. A bit is either a zero or a one, an on or an off. Bits are collected into sets of eight known as bytes. In Random Access Memory alone, the computer I’m using to write this blog has 32 gigabytes, or 257,698,037,760 bits, and those data points do not address calculations per second, disk capacity, or any of the other parameters used in evaluating digital computing performance. It can perform virtual reality, web surfing, media playing, word processing (obviously), and hundreds of other pretty amazing things. Still, it all comes down to the bit – on or off, one or zero, is or is not.

Which brings us back to our conundrum. Project Managers may seem to have a rather simple set of tasks to execute, and the proper way of executing them has generated more guidance than could probably fit on my hard drive (2.72 TB, or 2,989,847,736,320 bytes). I myself have written about some of the more robotic aspects of filling in the Corrective Actions section of a typical Variance Analysis Report, to wit:

But if the events and circumstances surrounding the decisions that we PMs make on a day-to-day basic could be reduced to an all-inclusive set of objectively measurable parameters, then computers with the ability to evaluate Earned Value and Critical Path data and connect that information stream to a (much larger) response codex similar to the table above would have replaced us long ago. That aint gonna happen, at least not anytime soon, and the reason should be obvious: there’s far too much nuance attached to the PM decision-making process than could ever be reduced to a formulaic when-you-see-this-do-that response system, and any attempt to create such a system (cough, risk management, cough) can only proceed from a rather dubious reductionist starting point.

This aspect of PM serves as part of the answer to the question I posed in last week’s blog, on why digital transformation, while having a profound impact on so many other areas of human endeavor, haven’t had a similar impact on PM. Projects are, by definition, unique. Sure, some aspects of PM can be executed via template, like the list of rules for creating a Work Breakdown Structure[i]; but those aspects, ignored or abused as they often are, are in the minority of the matters and issues requiring insightful decision-making from the PM. As cringe-worthy as I find the assertion that PM is as much art as science, I cannot flatly refute it, as much as I may wish to.

All of which points to our epistemological dichotomy, between those parts of PM that can be addressed as Boolean choices – digital, if you will – as compared to that set of decisions within the purview of PM that are so nuanced that not only can they not be adequately addressed via some codex of hard-and-fast rules, they probably can’t even be solidly justified by their associated audit trails. Red-light cameras at intersections may be able to take one particular enforcement of a traffic ordinance off of a police officer’s responsibilities, but would you want such a device calling an automatic infraction for an improper lane change, much less a far more complex violation?

So, yeah, a digital transformation doesn’t necessarily mean that the thing being transformed is getting smarter. It might not even be intelligent.

[i] Basic rules for setting up a WBS: (1) each WBS element must have a set piece of scope, (2) discernible beginning and ending dates, (3) a specific set of resources assigned to it, (4) one person (or organizational entity) is responsible for it, and (5) no “child” can have more than one “parent.” Without these conditions fulfilled, odds are you’ve placed an Organizational or Functional Breakdown Structure element into your WBS.