IT Through Invisibility

Taoist management for IT leaders, drawn from Stephen T. Chang's The Integral Management of Tao. The best IT is the kind nobody notices. Newsletter below.

[IT Through Invisibility @ITInvisibility]

1/ Your audit scramble probably isn't a compliance problem. It's one handoff upstream.

Stephen T. Chang listed his five departments in an order that reads like a feeding order. 🧵

[IT Through Invisibility @ITInvisibility]

@nyike Borrowed access is the fastest way to get a demo working. Give every SI (superintelligence) agent its own identity, least privilege and a named human owner, and log its changes apart from whoever launched it. Otherwise the audit trail points at the wrong person.

[IT Through Invisibility @ITInvisibility]

@dhinchcliffe @Frontier_Now @sarbjeetjohal @MeghanMBiro @eric_kavanagh @EvanKirstel @profhamel @MarshaCollier @nyike @vijayasankarv @waynesadin The checkpoint I'd add for CIOs: before an SI (superintelligence) agent takes over a task, name who does that work today and what their next role is. If nobody can answer, the plan is a cost cut, not a transformation.

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@erickimberling Stephen T. Chang wrote, "TOO MANY REGULATIONS = NO REGULATION." Customizations work the same way. Each one is a rule every upgrade has to honor. Approve the few that protect a real requirement, give each a named owner, and send the rest back to the process.

[IT Through Invisibility @ITInvisibility]

"As long as human beings exist, management will exist."
— Stephen T. Chang

My read for IT: adding SI (superintelligence) tools doesn't remove management, it moves it. Someone still has to set the scope, check the output, and answer when it's wrong.

[IT Through Invisibility @ITInvisibility]

Source: Dr. Stephen T. Chang, The Integral Management of Tao: Complete Achievement (Tao Publishing, 1988), ch. 8, pp. 168-177. Quotes and paraphrases from my copy; the IT mapping is mine. His books: https://t.co/CAPAx4m904

[IT Through Invisibility @ITInvisibility]

1/ Most bad system decisions aren't made with bad data. They're made from one seat.

Stephen T. Chang had a five-question grid for seeing a decision from every seat around it. 🧵

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5/ SI (superintelligence) agents sit in two seats: something you control, and something doing the same work. Each needs a named owner.

Part 5 of 8 in The Five-Element IT Team: "Five Relations: Know Who Feeds You and Who Checks You"

https://t.co/geL0wGd983

[IT Through Invisibility @ITInvisibility]

@nyike The department of know works when the sanctioned path is easier than the workaround. Publish which SI (superintelligence) tools are approved, what data can go in them, and who to ask. Most shadow use is people solving a real problem without a safe option.

[IT Through Invisibility @ITInvisibility]

@dhinchcliffe @IBM @Apptio Invoices aren't ROI. The scoreboard needs a named owner per SI (superintelligence) use case and one business measure agreed before the spend starts, like cycle time or error rate. Without that, cost attribution shows where the money went, not whether it was worth it.

[IT Through Invisibility @ITInvisibility]

@erickimberling Stephen T. Chang wrote, "Therefore, a good leader must be like a detective—he must be suspicious." Before blaming the software, check the process, the training and the data. Replacing a system on a wrong diagnosis just moves the same problems to new software.

[IT Through Invisibility @ITInvisibility]

https://t.co/FB6DTYFKmU

[IT Through Invisibility @ITInvisibility]

Epicor CEO: "When people say autonomous ERP or autonomous software, I think it’s a little disrespectful to people". Epicor says Prism takes only pre-approved actions under human oversight. SI (superintelligence) should save hours, not erase judgment.

[IT Through Invisibility @ITInvisibility]

@star_cio @nyike Governance bolted on after go-live is paperwork, not control. For SI (superintelligence) agents I'd require an inventory, a named owner, and a kill switch before the first production call. If you can't see it, you can't explain it to an auditor.

[IT Through Invisibility @ITInvisibility]

@nyike Agree on naming the three phases before the pilot starts. In a validated shop the lifecycle cost includes retesting every time the SI (superintelligence) model or workflow changes. If that line is blank, the budget is already fiction.

[IT Through Invisibility @ITInvisibility]

@erickimberling Stephen T. Chang wrote, "Nothing is accomplished, yet the confusion and expenses mount." An ERP overrun usually means decisions and ownership lagged the spend. Swapping the partner helps only if someone inside owns the outcomes and can stop work that lacks evidence.

[IT Through Invisibility @ITInvisibility]

Issue #6, part 4 of The Five-Element IT Team, includes a 20-minute exercise to find the bridge for your team's longest-running argument:

https://t.co/ILH76zpUrC

[IT Through Invisibility @ITInvisibility]

Two capable people. Same goals. They still can't work together.

Most leaders reach for a workshop or a reorg. In 1988, Dr. Stephen T. Chang described a cheaper fix: don't separate them. Put the right function between them.

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Urgency keeps skipping change control? Give operations a fast, pre-approved emergency change path that still leaves evidence.

SI (superintelligence) agents can fill in the record, but name the human who owns the bridge first.

Keep the check. Remove the collision.