What the System Reveals
and what you put there yourself
Digitalization does not create disorder. It shows you the disorder that was already there.
The message arrived the day after go-live.
An administrative assistant could not prepare her monthly report. She had been using that specific report for six months. Nobody on the project knew it existed.
Her direct manager had been in every meeting.
He did not know either.
We had a three-thousand-person company. Department heads, their managers, a full project team. People who knew their processes.
That was the assumption.
The assumption was almost correct.
Almost.
The process lived in one person's head. Quietly. Invisibly. Not hidden on purpose. Just never surfaced, because nobody had asked the right question at the right moment.
We resolved the situation. Found a workaround. The assistant got her data through a different route.
But the thing that stayed with me was not the solution.
It was this: we did not create the problem. The system just made it visible.
There is a second story.
A document management system. Ten years in production. Inside it: one hundred different workflows.
We could have migrated them. Copied them into the new system, one by one. That would have been the fast path.
Instead, we spent two months mapping.
The result: a little more than ten unique workflows.
The other ninety were not mistakes, exactly. Nobody created them with bad intent. Each one appeared the same way. Someone came with a process. Nobody checked whether the existing solution already covered it. It was easier to create a new instance than to ask a question. Simpler in the moment. Invisible in the cost.
Once. Then again. Then a hundred times.
After ten years, nobody could say which ones were real and which ones were temporary solutions that had simply never been removed.
Complexity is not created because it is necessary.
It is created because someone, at some point, did not ask enough questions. And because it is almost always easier to add than to understand.
This is what digitalization does.
It does not generate disorder. It amplifies what is already present. The invisible assistant report. The ninety redundant workflows. The process that lives in one person's head and disappears when that person leaves.
The system reveals all of it.
That is not a failure of the technology. That is the technology working exactly as intended.
The question is not whether you are ready to implement the system.
The question is whether you are ready to see what the system will show you.