The joke
A robot gives the leaving speech for the last middle manager. The warmest tribute it can find comes from the spreadsheets.
The irony
Middle managers are an easy target in every AI story. But look at what those spreadsheets were doing: the real rota, the workarounds, the bits that joined one department to the next. Much of it lived in one person's files and one person's head. When he goes, it doesn't get automated. It just stops.
So what?
The flagship paper describes a shift system with two rotas: the plan, and the reality, which was the one the organiser actually worked from every day. The real work is not the documented work. So before removing any layer, write down what it does: what comes in, what's done to it, what goes out, and who answers for it. Then decide what a person, software or AI should do.
What does the middle of your organisation actually hold together? Tell us in the comments, or respond to the paper.
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