Dealing with the black box

The other day I wanted to change the monthly payment for my energy contract. I had to fill in all these data. For some data I could guess why they needed them to process my request. But I also had to fill in stuff I had no clue why they were relevent. So what happens with all these data? This question pops in my mind everytime I enter data into a web form or app. Of course they will store my data. But they will also trigger some decision making. But what kind of decisions do they trigger? And what is the outcome I could expect? In this case, will they accept my request to change my monthly payment? I got a message: “Thank you for your request. We will try to process it within 10 workdays”. Seriously?! What are they going to check? Why must that take 10 workdays? Aren’t the decision rules already available? And since they have all my data, shouldn’t the outcome be instantly available?

Can’t I just get an instant response?

So what would it look like when a decision process is fully transparent and real-time? Imagine ordering products on a web shop. After having added several products to you shopping cart you are checking out. And you see the following result. Every data you entered, fully explained like in the below picture.

The you see that you received a discount. You are paying 92.70 euro instead of 103. That is always nice, but where did that come from? So how would it be if you could actually see the decision rule that calculated that discount? Something like:

When Customer1 checks out Shopping cart1
And the Amount Shopping cart1 is totalled to is greater than or equal to 100

Create Price2
Assign Price2 to Shopping cart1 as the Price it is reduced to
Assign ((the Amount that Shopping cart1 is totalled to [divided by] 100) [multiplied by] 90) to Price2 as the Amount it contains of

Would this make things more transparent? And wouldn’t it be nice that these kind of decision processes ran instantly, without having to wait a whopping 10 days to receive a response to a filled in web form? This is actually how hapsah.org or works!

Try it yourself: hapsah.org/try-now/