Human API: Do You Have A Hidden Corporate Glue?
Five quick questions about the invisible human integration between systems, teams, rules knowledge, and exceptions.
The process diagram looks clean but in reality one particular person always comes up before the workflow can be finished.
Take five quick questions to see whether the behaviour looks familiar.
How much does your organisation rely on “the person who just knows”?
Five quick questions, stay true to what actually happens in the workplace, not what the process map says.
When information needs to move between two systems or teams, what usually happens?
When the documented process stops working, there is someone who knows the workaround.
How often does someone need to make a judgement call that isn’t written down anywhere?
When a piece of work gets stuck, people are most likely to say…
That person is away for a week. What happens?
The actual workflow contains a human step the formal picture may not show.
Formal systems and processes rarely connect every piece of work cleanly. Sometimes a person fills the remaining gap by translating, reconciling, routing, remembering exceptions or applying judgement.
The visible task may look manual but the useful question is what the person is adding that the surrounding system does not.
Human API
A person who has quietly become part of the interface between systems, teams, rules or information that do not connect smoothly on their own.
There may be a perfectly sensible reason.
A human bridge can be a very effective adaptation to reality so in the end, the organisation may be getting real value from it.
Useful adaptations become harder to see once everybody relies on them, if undocumented.
The pattern gets sticky when the same person becomes the routine route for exceptions, translation or context and the dependency is never consciously designed. A helpful adaptation can slowly accumulate waiting time, interruption load and key-person risk.
