3 ms·

A business that invests in building a machine that reads data, produced by a 3rd party machine, using format intended for lay humans to read, is not investing i

A business that invests in building a machine that reads data, produced by a 3rd party machine, using format intended for lay humans to read, is not investing in the right tech IMO. Small-mediums should be looking to consolidate buying through a few good suppliers and working with them directly to automate process, or adopting interchange formats. Problem for some small-business is the cost (process changes, licencing etc) of adopting interchange formats and working with large vendors is prohibitive at their scale e.g. the airline BSP system. I agree that solving the problem generally i.e. replacing an accounts payable staff person capable of processing arbitrary invoice documents will be comparable to self-driving in difficulty. If a company deals with a lot of a single type of PDF, then the approach could be economical. I am actually involved in a project looking at doing this with AWS Textract.

speedplane 7y ago
> A business that invests in building a machine that reads data, produced by a 3rd party machine, using format intended for lay humans to read, is not investing in the right tech IMO. Building machines that understand formats that are understood by humans is exactly what we should be doing. People should read, write, and process information in a format that is comfortable and optimized to them. Machines should bend to us, we should not bend to them. If businesses only dealt with machine readable formats, everyone's computer would still be using the command line. And there's real condescension in your post: > Small-mediums should be looking to consolidate buying through a few good suppliers and working with them directly to automate process You're saying that businesses need to change their business to accommodate data formats, but it should be the other way around.
- kbutler 7y ago
  There has to be compromise. The proliferation of computers in business over the last 50 years is precisely because businesses can save money/expand capacity by adapting the business processes to the capabilities of the computers. Over that time, computers have become more friendly to humans, but businesses have adapted and humans been trained to use what computers can do.

speedplane 7y ago

> A business that invests in building a machine that reads data, produced by a 3rd party machine, using format intended for lay humans to read, is not investing in the right tech IMO. Building machines that understand formats that are understood by humans is exactly what we should be doing. People should read, write, and process information in a format that is comfortable and optimized to them. Machines should bend to us, we should not bend to them. If businesses only dealt with machine readable formats, everyone's computer would still be using the command line. And there's real condescension in your post: > Small-mediums should be looking to consolidate buying through a few good suppliers and working with them directly to automate process You're saying that businesses need to change their business to accommodate data formats, but it should be the other way around.

kbutler 7y ago
There has to be compromise. The proliferation of computers in business over the last 50 years is precisely because businesses can save money/expand capacity by adapting the business processes to the capabilities of the computers. Over that time, computers have become more friendly to humans, but businesses have adapted and humans been trained to use what computers can do.