Ordinant

The ideas and machinery behind Ordinant.

Essays on decisions, authority, evidence and the machinery companies need around them.

Start here

  1. The primitive nobody built

    It follows thirty years of enterprise software along three tracks: data, identity and workflow. None of them produced the decision itself, and the essays below take up each track in turn.

Then, in order

  1. You can’t learn a company from its inbox

    A model given a company’s whole archive of messages can see what the company did, but not what decided it, because what decided it was never in the messages.

  2. Context graphs are more ambitious than they sound

    However many traces of what happened a system keeps, they do not show why it was allowed; that has to be captured when it happens.

  3. We did this last time

    A precedent found in the records carries the answer but not what made it right at the time, so a company cannot safely reuse judgment it has already paid for.

  4. The AI doesn’t know who you are

    Identity says who may act and a grant says how far they may go, but neither says whether this act, in this case, should commit the company.