I think the closest that this has come is in the form of GitLab, which pretty famously did a ton of the corporate work in the format of a very open Handbook (https://handbook.gitlab.com/)
In the early years, it was extremely, extremely open and comprehensive. I've definitely looked through it when I wasn't sure how to handle something at work.
This is not a new or novel idea. I proposed such a thing at the start of my career in tech, and repeatedly propose it when I feel I have ears willing to listen.
The problem - and I do mean the problem, the only problem - is the threat this poses to power dynamics in the organization.
Compliance people do not benefit from their outputs being readily searchable and indexed like this, because it means there’s less need for them. Executives and leaders do not benefit from this, because they’re increasingly hired specifically because of their knowledge of various compliance frameworks. The people whose power derives from this knowledge and expertise are overwhelmingly the people in charge of the company and its operations, and they benefit more from blocking it outright than implementing it.
Don’t get me wrong, I love this idea. I love transparency in organizations, because it makes it infinitely easier to identify and remediate problems beyond silo walls. It’s peak cooperation, and I am all for it.
I also do not see it happening at scale while competition is considered the default operating mode of society at large. That said, I would love to work for an organization placing importance on this degree of internal cooperation. I suspect I’d thrive there.
There’s plenty of software that does this sort of thing, often industry specific but plenty that aren’t. You don’t see it “as code” in the raw like this article wants mainly because a company doesn’t deal with this information in such a non-integrated way, they do so as part of a more integrated whole. Monolithic ERP suites are probably the best example, and when done well it really does make a whole host of things easier and more seamless, like compliance modules that run defined routines that track with policy as implemented in operational modules.
We came at it from the perspective of DAOs, which was helpful at first but ultimately limiting. I think a non-blockchain version of this will take off. Tailscale is in a good position to do it.
Our earned insight is that you need to build the right primitive for delegation that works up and down the org. Our latest thinking on that is what we call a “Trust Zone” - more details here: https://blog.hatsprotocol.xyz/making-daos-work
You can ignore the “DAO” parts. Happy to answer any questions, I’m still very inspired by this line of inquiry.
Isn't this essentially just trying to reinvent ERP (i.e. what SAP has built a 207 billion dollar company at time of writing on and 90% of fortune 500 companies along with endless other large organizations use).
One can argue that ERP as code is higher value than whatever it is right now, but to act like this is a totally new idea is insane.
I worked in a place where basically everything that happened in the company was implemented as actions within Lotus Notes.
While the choice of implementation and performance were abysmal (Notes was a great/the only choice when the decision was made but 25 years later not so much), the actual idea was amazing and it worked extremely well.
It's all cool as long as you keep all of this up to date, and that requires a lot of scrutiny and discipline.
Once I had to go through a security audit at a job I had. Part of it was to show managing secret keys and who had access to them. And then I realized that the list of people who had access to one key was different than the list of the code owners of the service I was looking at, which was yet different than the list of the administrators of that service. 3 different sources of truth about ownership, all in code, all out of sync.
As a programmer and founder, I think the idea is incredible, I would just change the understanding of "Code", given that what we've been hearing most lately is that "a markdown file is all you need".
I think it's not too far-fetched to think about standards, cultures, guardrails, compliance, etc. being documented, versioned, but more importantly, verifiable and applicable. In natural language, no code needed.
I suspect hes designed a system for HIS company, which is in a data heavy industry. this doesnt apply to most other types of company, and I suspect when he tries to actually do it, it falls apart when he tries to define any requirement or obligation that stems from legislation. If the law was a coherent and unambiguous specification, thered be no problem, but the reality of it is messy and not so easily defined.
Licensing it as AGPL-v3 throws up an interesting question - given the thing this produces is your company as code, if you use this does your entire company count as a larger work that would need to be open sourced? Or is there an explicit distinction between the "firmware" (excuse me) and the work product?
If I had the capacity to take on this kind of modeling project right now, I'd probably lean toward Prolog or something like an OWL/Protégé ontology. Then it could just metastasize to the limits of my time and neurochemistry.
I do this, more or less, for my small law firm. Employee and client information are stored in Recfiles and accessed with GNU Recutils. Adding or changing is a pull request, and all sorts of GitHub actions run. Works pretty well!
+1 would love to see a video or read an extended write-up of how you implemented and work with your system on a daily basis, and what exactly it does for you
Wat, how have I never heard of this! Very cool. Do you have any insights you could share on your own setup, what worked well and what didn't? Are you just storing information in plaintext, or do you use some visualization libraries to make consuming the information a bit easier as well? Very curious about your setup.
I think that it is a narrow view of a "developer" that imagine reinventing what basically already exist in decade with HR/"people management" management software that are widely distributed.
It is sometimes also done by big ERP and basically available in any big directory and access management platform like Microsoft Entra ID (or whatever is the last current name) and co...
In some big companies, for expenses or performance reviews you have a terrible stack of relationship info and logic involved.
We could even say somehow that the first big entreprise software were creating with that kind of purpose for the modern IT area.
The worst limitation to all of this is users being lazy to input all the info that might be required, or updating it.
For example, how many of you never filled their "address" in their record in the big company internal directory portal because it looks useless and is not mandatory?
- I'm not convinced the graph is necessarily cyclic. Often two codependents are actually dependent on some common bits and otherwise independent.
- this is essentially deterministic propagation of configuration (think dhall, jsonnet, etc) plus reconciliation loops for external state, terraform style — not dissimilar to how the rest of CI/CD should operate, in fact my view is this is an extension of CI/CD practices up the value stream.
I'm definitely strive for something like this when possible.
USM tools is based on Unified Service Management (USM) method, which provides the necessary concepts to take the the vision one step further. The core idea is similar however: everything a company does is a service, and services can be defined as data. The surprising finding from USM is that in practice it is possible to meaningfully define any service only through five types of processes.
As services are data, you can have multiple views on that data. And as all data is in standardized format, it becomes possible to make generic cross-references between USM and for example ISO27K as rules that refer to your data, and those rules can be evaluated. As a result, you can see your ISO27K compliance on a dashboard in real-time.
You're citing the article mid-sentence. The full sentence is:
> Imagine if we could represent our entire organisational structure programmatically instead—not a static picture, but a living, breathing digital representation of our company that can be versioned, queried, tested, and automatically verified.
So yeah, the organisation is living and breathing by virtue of the humans inside of it.
But the representation of its organisational structure refers to a picture of an org chart.
Non-tech people also aspire to have the entire org structure represented digitally.
But in static, proprietary binary formats in file repositories that can only be manually queried.
Our code is already checked into version control and can be programmatically accessed via CI, agents, etc. Our software production environments can already be queried programmatically via APIs. Our issue trackers have hooks that react to support tickets, pull requests, CI. Then there's an airgap where the rest of the org sits with Word documents and pushes digital paper around. Artifacts delivered to customers that must be manually copied, attached, downloaded by hand.
The dream is that modern software development practices would propagate throughout companies.
I love this idea despite the real world operational challenges - most people with governance responsibilities in organizations don't want to code, and code is often too precise to model messy social/organizational context without constant tweaking, tending, and exception management.
I'm an advocate for bringing software culture to GRC, or as it's sometimes called “GRC Engineering”. While there are plenty of products to automate evidence generation for auditors, the underlying policies and documents that they prescribe are usually still old-school Word/PDF-style boilerplate junk.
I'm working on an open source project for security policies/processes/standards that map back to underlying frameworks (e.g. SOC 2, GDPR, ISO 27001, etc.) Docs are Markdown with YAML frontmatter metadata, interlinks generated automatically, site is published via GitHub actions.
> I'm working on an open source project for security policies/processes/standards that map back to underlying frameworks (e.g. SOC 2, GDPR, ISO 27001, etc.) Docs are Markdown with YAML frontmatter metadata, interlinks generated automatically, site is published via GitHub actions.
> Would love to know if others find it useful or have built similar systems.
Yes, to both for over a decade now, and by now there are many so one doesn't need to rewalk the whole path, some are developed in open on GitHub.
Commercial firms have built on that for live monitoring of the mappings, although don't scratch at that too hard, it's generally mostly (a) self-selected subsets of controls, and (b) manually self-reported at the end of the day.
Have you Googled this or talked to large firms (e.g. banks) that care about avoiding footfalls with regularly scheduled regulator exams? Writing your own shows you grok the concept, many need (well paid!) help applying something off the shelf or from OSS.
Well developed and maintained Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) go along way towards repeatable human processes. The hard part is finding the organizational discipline to use/maintain them.
I always felt the idea of trying to align your code, policy, software and infrastructure so it's easy to do compliance is the bread and butter of devops and devsecops in a regulated environment,
Is this an article by someone who's just done ISO 27001 for the first time and realised that?
The DSL described in this post really resonates with me. I recently worked on a programming language that uses similar structures [0]. It lets the user define entities and their shape (Role, OrganisationalUnit, Person in this post) and entries for those entities. It contains a small scripting API that can be used to derive information from these "facts". Company as code could definitely be implemented on top of this.
I feel like this is kind of missing the point that companies are mainly a group of humans and their roles and responsibilities matter to them emotionally. Managing those expectations and feelings can only be done by other humans that feel empathy (good managers) and abstracting such relationships onto something that can be "versioned, queried, tested, and automatically verified" might create a shitty soulless place to work.
Anything can be used for the good or for the bad. Defining how the organization is structured and how it operates usually is usually not about how people really do their actual work -- unless there are safety etc. regulations that must be met. Many enterprises are in constant chaos, which stresses people out. Adding some structure to it helps to alleviate that stress. For example, if there is a good template to document something, you don't have to start from the scratch. Of course, you could also go all in automate all your "management", in order to avoid talking with your employees. I don't think that will end well.
Yes - the author's observations are not wrong. Companies, on paper, are logical. However, as one professor told us in college "All companies are perfect until you introduce the humans".
Humans are messy. Humans work outside of whatever system you create. You can codify all your things all you want, it simply will not capture the operational complexity of a business run by humans.
The problem needs to be flipped on its head. LLMs give us the capacity to do just that. It's far more accurate to analyze what the humans are doing, note deviations and follow up on those where regulatory compliance is required. This captures both written processes as well as their practical implementations.
Exactly this and its a blind spot in the article. LLM's / orchestrated specialist agents can query SOP's, policy docs, compliance docs. Having humans build these artifacts in code isn't really needed at this point. Maybe if there is an interim format LLM's can use that save tokens / time / etc. Wouldn't assume that looks exactly like exactly what human coders would have used the past though.
> However, when describing and managing our company, we resort to digital paper and tidbits of info distributed across people in the building.
The perception that ISO/IEC 27001:2022 is simply an exercise in document creation and curation is frustrating. It is not, but an auditor cannot be in your company for a year or three, so the result is the next best thing: your auditor looks at written evidence, with things like timestamps, resumes, meeting minutes, agendas, and calendars, and concludes that based on the evidence that you are doing the things you said you're doing in your evidence reviews and interviews.
The consequence if you are not doing these things happens if you get sued, if you get yelled at by the French data protection regulator, or if you go bankrupt due to a security incident you didn't learn from, and your customers are breathing down your neck.
All of the documentation in the world doesn't mean you actually do the things you write down, but we have to be practical: until you consider these things, you aren't aware of them. You can read the standard and just do the best practices, and you'll be fine. The catch is that if you want the piece of paper, you go to an auditor, and people buy things because that paper means that there is now an accountability trail and people theoretically get in trouble if that turns out to be false.
It's like the whole problem with smart contracts is that you can't actually tether them to real world outcomes where the smart aspect falls apart (like relying on some external oracle to tell the contract what to do). Your customers care about ISO because your auditor was accredited by a body like ANAB to audit you correctly, and that reduces the risk of you botching some information security practice. This means that their data is in theory, more safe. And if it isn't, there is a lawsuit on the other end if things go awry.
I've used to do something like this, on a smaller scale and dubbed it "organization as code". As long as you have good enough providers for Terraform/Pulumi you can declaratively specify a lot of the interconnected stuff in a company.
I built this around GitHub as the indentity provider as my interest was declaratively defining repository access control, while also being able to use users public ssh keys to (re)provision services to get them access automatically.
I've done the same thing and I would not call it anywhere near org-as-code either. An organization is much more than a list of responsibilities, people, and compliance requirements.
For the latter, we already have policy-as-code tooling that actually works.
Might be a second language thing. Organization for me is stronger related to the root word organize; label, classify, cluster, etc. than something pertaining to processes and procedures.
Um.” Manfred finds it, floating three tiers down an elaborate object hierarchy. It’s flashing for attention. There’s a priority interrupt, an incoming lawsuit that hasn’t propagated up the inheritance tree yet. He prods at the object with a property browser. “I’m afraid I’m not a director of that company, Mr. Glashwiecz. I appear to be retained by it as a technical contractor with nonexecutive power, reporting to the president, but frankly, this is the first time I’ve ever heard of the company. However, I can tell you who’s in charge if you want.” “Yes?” The attorney sounds almost interested. Manfred figures it out; the guy’s in New Jersey. It must be about three in the morning over there. Malice—revenge for waking him up—sharpens Manfred’s voice. “The president of http://agalmic.holdings
.root.184.97.AB5 is http://agalmic.holdings
.root.184.97.201. The secretary is http://agalmic.holdings
.root.184.D5, and the chair is http://agalmic.holdings
.root.184.E8.FF. All the shares are owned by those companies in equal measure, and I can tell you that their regulations are written in Python. Have a nice day, now!”
thanks for the recommendation, I've put a hold on it for my library now.
This article reminds me of another book [1] called Holacracy where how a business is run is systematized according to other pre-defined principles. David Allen, a productivity trainer, used it at his own company for several years before eventually moving away from it because the ongoing overhead to keep its system up was too much.
I wonder if this system will end up like that as well. I love the idea, but I think humans operate at a squishier level than our computers do, there's a risk of 'massive bureaucratic dehumanization and inflexible processes' and the Iron Law of Organizations that make such efforts as that book and this article fraught with peril. Taylorism has its limits.
But hey, if this works, I'll be excited to see more businesses adopting better practices and less painful fumbling around trying to do practices in an organic or unplanned way.
"Code" is absolutely the wrong word here. There's nothing executable about it.
It's a model. And it will inevitably be incomplete and out of data, because the map is not the territory[1]
Of course, the same is true about the unstructured documents he laments, and whatever is done with those documents could probably sped up a lot this way, probably enough to justify the cost of building and maintaining it.
But the more advanced use cases he imagines run a big risk of making very costly decisions based on an incomplete or outdated model.
Interestingly, reading about Yegge's Gas Town got me thinking about this topic. Gas Town aims to create a "dark software factory" where agents organize themselves to build software autonomously with only high-level human direction, so Yegge created a weird rube goldberg fever dream of cats, preachers, diggers, mayors and god knows what else. But why? We already have real human organizations staffed and structured in particular ways that are able to deliver software, why not follow that pattern? With something like this, agents can start with a generic software dev shop and iterate on their own organization, instead of Yegge manually dreaming up what roles and relationships should exist.
The OP doesn’t understand the “gray zone” corporations operate. Pretty much every interaction, decision and actions operate in this domain. Ambiguity and intentional compartmentalization on a need to know basis.
A company is more than the function of it's org chart.
There's business description being uncaptured sporadically in every Slack message, watercooler moment and email. (two of those are much easier than the other).
If you boil someone's actual job down to a HR job spec and assume that will suffice... you'll produce both absurdly long HR job specs and still fail to capture the entirety of someone's role.
I think the closest that this has come is in the form of GitLab, which pretty famously did a ton of the corporate work in the format of a very open Handbook (https://handbook.gitlab.com/)
In the early years, it was extremely, extremely open and comprehensive. I've definitely looked through it when I wasn't sure how to handle something at work.
This is not a new or novel idea. I proposed such a thing at the start of my career in tech, and repeatedly propose it when I feel I have ears willing to listen.
The problem - and I do mean the problem, the only problem - is the threat this poses to power dynamics in the organization.
Compliance people do not benefit from their outputs being readily searchable and indexed like this, because it means there’s less need for them. Executives and leaders do not benefit from this, because they’re increasingly hired specifically because of their knowledge of various compliance frameworks. The people whose power derives from this knowledge and expertise are overwhelmingly the people in charge of the company and its operations, and they benefit more from blocking it outright than implementing it.
Don’t get me wrong, I love this idea. I love transparency in organizations, because it makes it infinitely easier to identify and remediate problems beyond silo walls. It’s peak cooperation, and I am all for it.
I also do not see it happening at scale while competition is considered the default operating mode of society at large. That said, I would love to work for an organization placing importance on this degree of internal cooperation. I suspect I’d thrive there.
There’s plenty of software that does this sort of thing, often industry specific but plenty that aren’t. You don’t see it “as code” in the raw like this article wants mainly because a company doesn’t deal with this information in such a non-integrated way, they do so as part of a more integrated whole. Monolithic ERP suites are probably the best example, and when done well it really does make a whole host of things easier and more seamless, like compliance modules that run defined routines that track with policy as implemented in operational modules.
We tried this at Hats Protocol, I think you’ll find our approach very aligned! https://blog.hatsprotocol.xyz/organizational-graphs
We came at it from the perspective of DAOs, which was helpful at first but ultimately limiting. I think a non-blockchain version of this will take off. Tailscale is in a good position to do it.
Our earned insight is that you need to build the right primitive for delegation that works up and down the org. Our latest thinking on that is what we call a “Trust Zone” - more details here: https://blog.hatsprotocol.xyz/making-daos-work
You can ignore the “DAO” parts. Happy to answer any questions, I’m still very inspired by this line of inquiry.
Isn't this essentially just trying to reinvent ERP (i.e. what SAP has built a 207 billion dollar company at time of writing on and 90% of fortune 500 companies along with endless other large organizations use).
One can argue that ERP as code is higher value than whatever it is right now, but to act like this is a totally new idea is insane.
I worked in a place where basically everything that happened in the company was implemented as actions within Lotus Notes.
While the choice of implementation and performance were abysmal (Notes was a great/the only choice when the decision was made but 25 years later not so much), the actual idea was amazing and it worked extremely well.
> the actual idea was amazing and it worked extremely well.
What do you think are the reasons it worked so well? Any anecdotes of why it was so effective?
It's all cool as long as you keep all of this up to date, and that requires a lot of scrutiny and discipline.
Once I had to go through a security audit at a job I had. Part of it was to show managing secret keys and who had access to them. And then I realized that the list of people who had access to one key was different than the list of the code owners of the service I was looking at, which was yet different than the list of the administrators of that service. 3 different sources of truth about ownership, all in code, all out of sync.
> 3 different sources of truth about ownership
I see only 1.
Admin, access <> ownership.
As a programmer and founder, I think the idea is incredible, I would just change the understanding of "Code", given that what we've been hearing most lately is that "a markdown file is all you need".
I think it's not too far-fetched to think about standards, cultures, guardrails, compliance, etc. being documented, versioned, but more importantly, verifiable and applicable. In natural language, no code needed.
I suspect hes designed a system for HIS company, which is in a data heavy industry. this doesnt apply to most other types of company, and I suspect when he tries to actually do it, it falls apart when he tries to define any requirement or obligation that stems from legislation. If the law was a coherent and unambiguous specification, thered be no problem, but the reality of it is messy and not so easily defined.
This is not a bad idea but this person basically reinvented LDAP. Everything he wanted to do is already in LDAP, much already in Active Directory.
They started with their schema and everything they said just screamed Active Directory.
Right down to the low code interface for changes.
All they need to do now is slap AI on it and they'll have bags of cash delivered to their door.
LAIDBACK - Lightweight AI Directory Barely Actually Checking Krendentialz?
Thanks for sharing!
I wrote this post some time ago, and more recently built a thing to do roughly this for my small business: https://github.com/42futures/firm
Had it in practice for about 4 months now and happy so far. It works for me, at my small scale. Hoping to share a follow-up with lessons learned soon.
This is incredibly cool.
Licensing it as AGPL-v3 throws up an interesting question - given the thing this produces is your company as code, if you use this does your entire company count as a larger work that would need to be open sourced? Or is there an explicit distinction between the "firmware" (excuse me) and the work product?
Licensing generally applies only to the thing being licensed and not its output.
Otherwise all software written with a GPLv3 editor would also be GPLv3…or all software built with a GPLv3 compiler would be GPLv3. (Neither are true)
If I had the capacity to take on this kind of modeling project right now, I'd probably lean toward Prolog or something like an OWL/Protégé ontology. Then it could just metastasize to the limits of my time and neurochemistry.
I do this, more or less, for my small law firm. Employee and client information are stored in Recfiles and accessed with GNU Recutils. Adding or changing is a pull request, and all sorts of GitHub actions run. Works pretty well!
+1 would love to see a video or read an extended write-up of how you implemented and work with your system on a daily basis, and what exactly it does for you
beyond the source controlled database, is it doing the same as what the article describes? ie enforces requirements etc
Wat, how have I never heard of this! Very cool. Do you have any insights you could share on your own setup, what worked well and what didn't? Are you just storing information in plaintext, or do you use some visualization libraries to make consuming the information a bit easier as well? Very curious about your setup.
In the future, laying off half the company will be just one terraform apply away.
To be fair I've seen some terraform fuck ups that that nearly did that already.
Fortunately AWS doesn't let you delete S3 buckets with files in them without emptying them first...
Or one AI agent tasked with optimizing the company finances.
I think that it is a narrow view of a "developer" that imagine reinventing what basically already exist in decade with HR/"people management" management software that are widely distributed. It is sometimes also done by big ERP and basically available in any big directory and access management platform like Microsoft Entra ID (or whatever is the last current name) and co...
In some big companies, for expenses or performance reviews you have a terrible stack of relationship info and logic involved.
We could even say somehow that the first big entreprise software were creating with that kind of purpose for the modern IT area.
The worst limitation to all of this is users being lazy to input all the info that might be required, or updating it. For example, how many of you never filled their "address" in their record in the big company internal directory portal because it looks useless and is not mandatory?
Eminently doable, yes.
Two notes:
- I'm not convinced the graph is necessarily cyclic. Often two codependents are actually dependent on some common bits and otherwise independent.
- this is essentially deterministic propagation of configuration (think dhall, jsonnet, etc) plus reconciliation loops for external state, terraform style — not dissimilar to how the rest of CI/CD should operate, in fact my view is this is an extension of CI/CD practices up the value stream.
I'm definitely strive for something like this when possible.
My company has been working for some years now on usm.tools (https://usm.tools/public/landing/), based on very similar approach.
USM tools is based on Unified Service Management (USM) method, which provides the necessary concepts to take the the vision one step further. The core idea is similar however: everything a company does is a service, and services can be defined as data. The surprising finding from USM is that in practice it is possible to meaningfully define any service only through five types of processes.
As services are data, you can have multiple views on that data. And as all data is in standardized format, it becomes possible to make generic cross-references between USM and for example ISO27K as rules that refer to your data, and those rules can be evaluated. As a result, you can see your ISO27K compliance on a dashboard in real-time.
> but a living, breathing digital representation of our company
It is breathing already, in the form of humans doing it.
No need to transform it into a static inflexible code thing.
You're citing the article mid-sentence. The full sentence is:
> Imagine if we could represent our entire organisational structure programmatically instead—not a static picture, but a living, breathing digital representation of our company that can be versioned, queried, tested, and automatically verified.
So yeah, the organisation is living and breathing by virtue of the humans inside of it.
But the representation of its organisational structure refers to a picture of an org chart.
Non-tech people also aspire to have the entire org structure represented digitally.
But in static, proprietary binary formats in file repositories that can only be manually queried.
Our code is already checked into version control and can be programmatically accessed via CI, agents, etc. Our software production environments can already be queried programmatically via APIs. Our issue trackers have hooks that react to support tickets, pull requests, CI. Then there's an airgap where the rest of the org sits with Word documents and pushes digital paper around. Artifacts delivered to customers that must be manually copied, attached, downloaded by hand.
The dream is that modern software development practices would propagate throughout companies.
Automate all the things!
I love this idea despite the real world operational challenges - most people with governance responsibilities in organizations don't want to code, and code is often too precise to model messy social/organizational context without constant tweaking, tending, and exception management.
I'm an advocate for bringing software culture to GRC, or as it's sometimes called “GRC Engineering”. While there are plenty of products to automate evidence generation for auditors, the underlying policies and documents that they prescribe are usually still old-school Word/PDF-style boilerplate junk.
I'm working on an open source project for security policies/processes/standards that map back to underlying frameworks (e.g. SOC 2, GDPR, ISO 27001, etc.) Docs are Markdown with YAML frontmatter metadata, interlinks generated automatically, site is published via GitHub actions.
The code is at https://github.com/engseclabs/graphgrc, and you can see an example published site here https://graphgrc.engseclabs.com.
Would love to know if others find it useful or have built similar systems.
> I'm working on an open source project for security policies/processes/standards that map back to underlying frameworks (e.g. SOC 2, GDPR, ISO 27001, etc.) Docs are Markdown with YAML frontmatter metadata, interlinks generated automatically, site is published via GitHub actions.
> Would love to know if others find it useful or have built similar systems.
Yes, to both for over a decade now, and by now there are many so one doesn't need to rewalk the whole path, some are developed in open on GitHub.
Commercial firms have built on that for live monitoring of the mappings, although don't scratch at that too hard, it's generally mostly (a) self-selected subsets of controls, and (b) manually self-reported at the end of the day.
Product examples: https://delve.co or https://safebase.io/products/trust-center
Applied example: https://trust.openai.com
Have you Googled this or talked to large firms (e.g. banks) that care about avoiding footfalls with regularly scheduled regulator exams? Writing your own shows you grok the concept, many need (well paid!) help applying something off the shelf or from OSS.
Well developed and maintained Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) go along way towards repeatable human processes. The hard part is finding the organizational discipline to use/maintain them.
I always felt the idea of trying to align your code, policy, software and infrastructure so it's easy to do compliance is the bread and butter of devops and devsecops in a regulated environment,
Is this an article by someone who's just done ISO 27001 for the first time and realised that?
The DSL described in this post really resonates with me. I recently worked on a programming language that uses similar structures [0]. It lets the user define entities and their shape (Role, OrganisationalUnit, Person in this post) and entries for those entities. It contains a small scripting API that can be used to derive information from these "facts". Company as code could definitely be implemented on top of this.
[0] https://thalo.rejot.dev/blog/plain-text-knowledge-management
I feel like this is kind of missing the point that companies are mainly a group of humans and their roles and responsibilities matter to them emotionally. Managing those expectations and feelings can only be done by other humans that feel empathy (good managers) and abstracting such relationships onto something that can be "versioned, queried, tested, and automatically verified" might create a shitty soulless place to work.
Anything can be used for the good or for the bad. Defining how the organization is structured and how it operates usually is usually not about how people really do their actual work -- unless there are safety etc. regulations that must be met. Many enterprises are in constant chaos, which stresses people out. Adding some structure to it helps to alleviate that stress. For example, if there is a good template to document something, you don't have to start from the scratch. Of course, you could also go all in automate all your "management", in order to avoid talking with your employees. I don't think that will end well.
Yes - the author's observations are not wrong. Companies, on paper, are logical. However, as one professor told us in college "All companies are perfect until you introduce the humans".
Humans are messy. Humans work outside of whatever system you create. You can codify all your things all you want, it simply will not capture the operational complexity of a business run by humans.
The problem needs to be flipped on its head. LLMs give us the capacity to do just that. It's far more accurate to analyze what the humans are doing, note deviations and follow up on those where regulatory compliance is required. This captures both written processes as well as their practical implementations.
Exactly this and its a blind spot in the article. LLM's / orchestrated specialist agents can query SOP's, policy docs, compliance docs. Having humans build these artifacts in code isn't really needed at this point. Maybe if there is an interim format LLM's can use that save tokens / time / etc. Wouldn't assume that looks exactly like exactly what human coders would have used the past though.
You are describing essentially a healthy company.
You're on a tech news website as a reminder.
> However, when describing and managing our company, we resort to digital paper and tidbits of info distributed across people in the building.
The perception that ISO/IEC 27001:2022 is simply an exercise in document creation and curation is frustrating. It is not, but an auditor cannot be in your company for a year or three, so the result is the next best thing: your auditor looks at written evidence, with things like timestamps, resumes, meeting minutes, agendas, and calendars, and concludes that based on the evidence that you are doing the things you said you're doing in your evidence reviews and interviews.
The consequence if you are not doing these things happens if you get sued, if you get yelled at by the French data protection regulator, or if you go bankrupt due to a security incident you didn't learn from, and your customers are breathing down your neck.
All of the documentation in the world doesn't mean you actually do the things you write down, but we have to be practical: until you consider these things, you aren't aware of them. You can read the standard and just do the best practices, and you'll be fine. The catch is that if you want the piece of paper, you go to an auditor, and people buy things because that paper means that there is now an accountability trail and people theoretically get in trouble if that turns out to be false.
It's like the whole problem with smart contracts is that you can't actually tether them to real world outcomes where the smart aspect falls apart (like relying on some external oracle to tell the contract what to do). Your customers care about ISO because your auditor was accredited by a body like ANAB to audit you correctly, and that reduces the risk of you botching some information security practice. This means that their data is in theory, more safe. And if it isn't, there is a lawsuit on the other end if things go awry.
The images really detract from the subject.
I've used to do something like this, on a smaller scale and dubbed it "organization as code". As long as you have good enough providers for Terraform/Pulumi you can declaratively specify a lot of the interconnected stuff in a company.
I built this around GitHub as the indentity provider as my interest was declaratively defining repository access control, while also being able to use users public ssh keys to (re)provision services to get them access automatically.
I've done the same thing and I would not call it anywhere near org-as-code either. An organization is much more than a list of responsibilities, people, and compliance requirements.
For the latter, we already have policy-as-code tooling that actually works.
Might be a second language thing. Organization for me is stronger related to the root word organize; label, classify, cluster, etc. than something pertaining to processes and procedures.
I recommend book Accelerado by Charlie Stross:
Um.” Manfred finds it, floating three tiers down an elaborate object hierarchy. It’s flashing for attention. There’s a priority interrupt, an incoming lawsuit that hasn’t propagated up the inheritance tree yet. He prods at the object with a property browser. “I’m afraid I’m not a director of that company, Mr. Glashwiecz. I appear to be retained by it as a technical contractor with nonexecutive power, reporting to the president, but frankly, this is the first time I’ve ever heard of the company. However, I can tell you who’s in charge if you want.” “Yes?” The attorney sounds almost interested. Manfred figures it out; the guy’s in New Jersey. It must be about three in the morning over there. Malice—revenge for waking him up—sharpens Manfred’s voice. “The president of http://agalmic.holdings .root.184.97.AB5 is http://agalmic.holdings .root.184.97.201. The secretary is http://agalmic.holdings .root.184.D5, and the chair is http://agalmic.holdings .root.184.E8.FF. All the shares are owned by those companies in equal measure, and I can tell you that their regulations are written in Python. Have a nice day, now!”
thanks for the recommendation, I've put a hold on it for my library now.
This article reminds me of another book [1] called Holacracy where how a business is run is systematized according to other pre-defined principles. David Allen, a productivity trainer, used it at his own company for several years before eventually moving away from it because the ongoing overhead to keep its system up was too much.
I wonder if this system will end up like that as well. I love the idea, but I think humans operate at a squishier level than our computers do, there's a risk of 'massive bureaucratic dehumanization and inflexible processes' and the Iron Law of Organizations that make such efforts as that book and this article fraught with peril. Taylorism has its limits.
But hey, if this works, I'll be excited to see more businesses adopting better practices and less painful fumbling around trying to do practices in an organic or unplanned way.
[1] https://www.holacracy.org/blog/dac-ceo-reflects-on-holacracy...
This is essentiality the concept of LDAP/Active Directory.
"Code" is absolutely the wrong word here. There's nothing executable about it.
It's a model. And it will inevitably be incomplete and out of data, because the map is not the territory[1]
Of course, the same is true about the unstructured documents he laments, and whatever is done with those documents could probably sped up a lot this way, probably enough to justify the cost of building and maintaining it.
But the more advanced use cases he imagines run a big risk of making very costly decisions based on an incomplete or outdated model.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation
Interestingly, reading about Yegge's Gas Town got me thinking about this topic. Gas Town aims to create a "dark software factory" where agents organize themselves to build software autonomously with only high-level human direction, so Yegge created a weird rube goldberg fever dream of cats, preachers, diggers, mayors and god knows what else. But why? We already have real human organizations staffed and structured in particular ways that are able to deliver software, why not follow that pattern? With something like this, agents can start with a generic software dev shop and iterate on their own organization, instead of Yegge manually dreaming up what roles and relationships should exist.
The OP doesn’t understand the “gray zone” corporations operate. Pretty much every interaction, decision and actions operate in this domain. Ambiguity and intentional compartmentalization on a need to know basis.
This sort of approach is likely intractable.
A company is more than the function of it's org chart.
There's business description being uncaptured sporadically in every Slack message, watercooler moment and email. (two of those are much easier than the other).
If you boil someone's actual job down to a HR job spec and assume that will suffice... you'll produce both absurdly long HR job specs and still fail to capture the entirety of someone's role.