Chapter 3 – In the Green

Eight weeks later the numbers were better than planned.

Simon liked numbers that were better than planned.

Not because they proved him right. That would have been too easy.

Good numbers meant you had less to explain.

On the screen in the operations room stood six tiles.

Turnaround time –23%

Manual reviews –31%

Misrouting 0.9%

Escalation SLA 96%

Complaints –8%

System availability 99.98%

Four tiles were green.

Two were grey.

None red.

“We’re at week seven now,” Simon said.

Twelve people sat in front of him. Operations, Claims, Risk, Data, IT. On the wall behind them still hung the project logo some agency had designed last summer.

PROTOKOLL.

Black letters. A thin circle around them.

Simon had never liked the logo.

A good internal system didn’t need a logo.

“What do we see?”

No one answered.

He waited.

The younger woman from Operations finally raised her hand, though no one here had to raise a hand.

“Fewer manual reviews than expected.”

“Why?”

“Because more cases are clear-cut.”

“No.”

She looked down at her notes.

Simon smiled.

“Almost.”

He went to the second tile.

“The cases haven’t become clearer. We’ve just stopped pretending we have to look at every one of them again.”

A few people smiled.

“That’s a difference.”

He clicked on.

A curve appeared.

Before PROTOKOLL, the number of open manual reviews had built up on Mondays and come down slowly by Thursday. On Fridays a remainder went into the weekend.

Now the line was flatter.

“In seven weeks we’ve avoided almost three thousand human reviews.”

“Saved,” someone said.

Simon looked round the room.

“Avoided.”

The man from Finance raised his hands.

“Semantics.”

“No.”

Simon changed the slide.

“Saved sounds as though the reviews were the problem. They weren’t. Unnecessary reviews were the problem.”

Martin Reiner sat at the back of the room.

He’d come in ten minutes late and taken the one free seat rather than move anyone.

Simon had noticed.

Of course he’d noticed.

“How many extra complex cases did that let us handle within the SLA?”

This time the woman from Operations answered at once.

“Four hundred and two.”

Simon nodded.

“That’s the number.”

Reiner crossed his arms.

“Not the thirty-one per cent?”

“No.”

“That would look better on a slide.”

“That’s why I’m using the other one.”

Reiner smiled.

Simon clicked on.

---

After the meeting Marek stayed.

In the past weeks he’d spoken less.

At first Simon had taken it as a good sign.

Today he wasn’t sure.

“What is it?”

Marek turned his screen.

“Segment X.”

Simon set down his coffee.

A table.

No chart this time.

“How many?”

“Fifty-seven.”

“Since January?”

“In total.”

Simon sat down beside him.

“New misroutings?”

“None clear.”

“Then I don’t understand your face.”

“You analyse faces now?”

“Only the easy ones.”

Marek scrolled.

“The confidence distribution is shifting.”

“By how much?”

“Not much.”

“Good.”

“That wasn’t meant to be reassuring.”

Simon looked at the numbers.

The cases sat close together. Model scores. Routing. Outcome. Manual correction, where there was one.

Nothing jumped out.

“What do you want to show me?”

Marek highlighted five rows.

“These.”

“What about them?”

“All above the cut-off.”

“That’s why they’re above the cut-off.”

“Barely.”

Simon waited.

“Marek.”

“If we still had the old threshold, four of them would be in review.”

“We don’t have the old threshold.”

“I know.”

“Because we changed it.”

“I know that too.”

Simon leaned back.

“And what exactly is new?”

Marek looked at him.

“Nothing yet.”

Simon had to laugh.

“You don’t make it easy for me.”

“That’s not my job.”

“Sometimes it is.”

Marek closed the window.

“I just want you to remember.”

“Remember what?”

“That we talked about it.”

Simon looked at him.

“I remember.”

“Good.”

Marek stood.

“Then I’ve done my job.”

He left.

Simon stayed in front of the screen.

The time was in the top right corner.

11:47.

He opened the dashboard again.

Misrouting 0.9%.

Green.

He clicked on the number.

A detail view opened.

A hundred and eighty-eight pages of data.

Simon didn’t scroll.

He knew what systems like this looked like when you went deep enough. The closer you got, the less you saw the whole.

He closed the view.

---

In the afternoon Lea Baumann walked him through the new reporting flow.

Lea ran the data-engineering team and talked about systems as if they were buildings.

“Up here is what you see.”

She pointed to a schematic.

“Dashboards, management reports, compliance exports.”

“Layer two.”

“If you insist on saying layers.”

“What do you call it?”

“The stuff you break.”

Simon grinned.

“And below that?”

“Operational.”

She clicked.

Claims data. Routing events. Model versions. Rule sets.

“And below that?”

“Nothing interesting.”

“That sounds interesting.”

“Only to people who like backups.”

Another box appeared.

Small. Grey.

Decision Event Store

“Every routing decision?”

“Every relevant one.”

“Since when?”

“The pilot.”

“Why have I never seen this?”

Lea looked at him.

“Because you have a job.”

Simon laughed.

“What’s in it?”

“Timestamp. Input reference. Model version. Threshold set. Routing output. A few technical fields.”

“Patient data?”

“Not in the clear. References.”

“Can it be changed?”

Lea made a face.

“Can you open a safe?”

“Yes.”

“Then it can be changed.”

“Helpful.”

“It’s append-only. Hash-chained. Retention policy. Write access is extremely limited. If someone wants to tamper with old events, they create more problems than they solve.”

“So no.”

“Practically no.”

Simon looked at the small grey box.

“And who looks in there?”

“Normally no one.”

“Then why do we store it?”

Lea shrugged.

“Audit.”

“Compliance?”

“Among other things.”

“And if no one looks?”

“Then everything’s fine.”

Simon looked at her.

“That’s an interesting definition.”

“If someone reads raw audit logs by choice, usually something has already gone very wrong.”

She clicked on.

The grey box disappeared.

Simon didn’t think about it again.

---

A little after six most of the floor was empty.

Simon stood at the window of his office.

In January he’d seen Zurich from a conference room, grey and still.

Now it was March.

The days had grown longer. There was still light over the lake.

His phone buzzed.

Katrin

Train 18:34. Home around 19:30.

Below it a second line.

Basel was good.

Simon wrote:

Great. Dinner 19:45?

The three dots appeared.

Disappeared.

Appeared again.

Yes.

Simon put the phone down.

On his second screen the presentation for the Steering Committee was open.

PROTOKOLL — POST-LAUNCH REVIEW

Below it:

Performance above business case.

He looked at the sentence.

Deleted above business case.

Wrote:

Performance above expectations.

That was more precise.

He added three numbers beneath it:

23% faster processing

31% fewer manual reviews

0.9% misrouting

Then he stopped.

Opened the notes.

Typed:

Continue monitoring Segment X.

He read the sentence.

Then added:

No new confirmed misroutings.

That was correct.

He saved.

Reiner appeared in the doorway.

“Still here?”

“Evidently.”

“You need to work on your work-life balance.”

“You’re here too.”

“I’m COO. I don’t have one.”

Simon closed the presentation.

Reiner came in.

“Good numbers.”

“Very good.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“I’m not.”

“Marek?”

Simon looked at him.

“What about him?”

“He looked today like someone had run over his dog.”

“He doesn’t have a dog.”

“You know what I mean.”

Simon sat down.

“He’s still watching the segment.”

“And?”

“No new confirmed errors.”

Reiner nodded.

“Then your decision was right.”

Simon looked out of the window.

“That’s not how it works.”

“How does it work?”

“A good decision doesn’t become good because the outcome is good.”

Reiner pulled up a chair.

“That sounds like something people say when the outcome is bad.”

Simon smiled.

“Maybe.”

Reiner turned serious.

“You made the right decision.”

Simon didn’t answer.

“We could have stopped the rollout over two cases. Then we’d have three thousand extra manual reviews right now, longer turnaround times, and more errors across the whole system.”

“I know the numbers.”

“Then enjoy them.”

“I am.”

Reiner stood.

“You’re bad at it.”

“At what?”

“Being right.”

Simon laughed.

“That’s new.”

“No. You’re good at being right. You’re bad at enjoying it.”

He went to the door.

“Martin.”

Reiner turned.

“If Marek does find something—”

“Then we’ll look at it.”

“Even if it damages the business case.”

Reiner looked at him for a few seconds.

“Of course.”

Simon nodded.

Reiner left.

---

At seven Simon shut down the computer.

The light in the corridor was already dimmed.

He stopped in front of the lifts.

On a large monitor the current operations numbers were running.

The dashboard cycled automatically between areas.

Claims.

Customer Service.

Case Management.

PROTOKOLL.

STATUS: GREEN

Simon waited for the lift.

Behind him the display changed.

17,842 cases processed.

4,106 automatically prioritised.

1,227 human escalations.

System accuracy: 99.1%.

The lift came.

Simon stepped in.

The doors closed.