The joke
The robots have come with a clipboard to decide who goes. They pick the one man they can't do without, and it isn't for his speed. It's because nobody else knows why the invoices work.
The irony
Every organisation has one. The person who knows the workaround: the spreadsheet behind the system, the step nobody wrote down, the reason it goes wrong on the last Friday of the month. None of that is on the org chart, so it rarely makes it into an AI plan either. Automate around him and you find out what he did on the morning he isn't there.
So what?
Our flagship paper argues that the real work is not the documented work. It runs through systems, spreadsheets, approvals and people's heads, and nobody holds the whole picture. That is why we think an organisation has to see itself first, before it takes anything apart. The case against is serious too: some know-how nobody wrote down may not fit a tidy description at all.
Who is the person in your place who knows why the invoices work? No names needed. Tell us in the comments, or respond to the paper.
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