Also the hallway conversation thing. Most of the time it’s small talk and minor social interaction, every now and then it’s critical out of band information that would not have shown up in normal processes.
To me it's a matter of fostering serendipity. and a bit ironic that research has shown conferences to be a great place for serendipity to take place, as that's what happened here.
I experienced this kind of situation, where only by chance conversation was a crisis averted, very much at my last FT. So much that I'm working on a startup for fostering serendipitous communication for remote teams, like private notes from coworkers left on stackoverflow questions (or anything on the web)
Probably inevitable these days given hallway conversations are going to be a pretty random thing. Of course, assumes someone needs to think something is important enough to put in chat and doesn't mind putting it out in public. (Ignore $XYZ project that other group is doing. It's got all sort of problems.)
Your highly usable dashboard will get filled with 99% of worthless fluff just because it's there and somebody feels the need to always say something.
Have you even been in one of those meetings that just won't finish despite everything being done? Making it written doesn't solve the problem. Instead, it makes it worse.
On point. This is also why good CI/CD automatically alerts users of major issues. It's just not a thing humans are good at to pay attention to a long stream of mostly boring information.
Computers are good at this though.
Now the only question is how you can automate the spec comparison such that issues with the spec and the parts used can be automatically compared.
And that starts with a computer readable spec that is updated by the manufacturer.
Personally, I despise status meetings. 99% of them are worthless fluff.
But, every now and then, you get something like this.
I think that highly usable dashboards are a good way to deal with this.
It's possible that AI could be a big help, here.