Do systems make work more cumbersome?

Do systems make work more cumbersome than it is already?  If you worked in the back office of any large company, you have contemplated this daily.  Systems are supposed to make work easier and not the other way around.   Large corporations have implemented behemoth ERP systems that no one really understands.   They usually don’t have anyone in-house that understands the intricacies of their system implementations.  Employees are seldom trained and knowledge typically gets passed down from one user to another.  Over the years knowledge of how to do work becomes more of a myth.  If the first person who learned the task was inefficient, that inefficiency gets passed down over the years.  In a large corporation, this leads to significant magnification in inefficiency as the scope of work expands as sales grows and more employees were added.

Most of the system maintenance, upgrade and improvement work in a typical large corporation are outsourced to capable consultants who don’t have a stake in business operations.   The IT department typically doesn’t have skin in the game and often complains that they are not to blame for any system issues, inefficiencies or delays in changes or upgrades for they don’t have budget to hire more consultants. IT department is staffed with project manager(s) who manage teams of consultants.   They are typically not accountable and don’t understand the magnitude of the problems or issues.  When push comes to shove they get to blame the consultants when budgets are exceeded or timelines are not met.   When one consulting company gets the axe one of their competitors get hired for the task.  Any smart people that are hired internally leave as soon as they find out that business cringes from using standard functionality and thrives on customization.  Every business leader in the Enterprise thinks they are different.  All this leads to absolute chaos in the workplace.  The system lacks basic architecture.  Accountable people in the business cringe from having to do anything in the system as it doesn’t work as desired or things take forever to accomplish.  They delegate most of their work to folks lower down the chain who are typically not accountable and don’t have knowledge of the work they are trying to transact.  All this introduces additional layers of complexities to a system that is already convoluted.

When a down turn hits, there is renewed focus on costs and to improve operational efficiency.  Down swoop in a new group of consultants from a different company who will map your processes and recommend ways to make it more efficient.   As they build process maps that can fill the four walls of a conference room, the basic essence why work is done gets lost.   Not much time is spent on simplifying process keeping the essence of why work is done in mind.  The surveys and interviews that are done are answered by people who are used to doing work inefficiently.  They specify requirements that are probably not accurate and are unnecessary.  The consultants then recommend quick wins using a new buzz word robotic process automation, which is another word for excel macros in an ERP system.  It helps automation of key stroke entries in the ERP system.  While consultants and the managers who hired them are claiming victory, there aren’t dramatic improvements in efficiencies.   For all that has been accomplished is the optimization of an inefficient process.   Rarely do senior functional managers who understand (hopefully) the purpose of doing work get involved in process redesign and process improvement work.  They are usually busy working on day to day tasks and are only peripherally involved in process improvement efforts.  Usually a young employee or someone on the team who is expendable is deputed to the process improvement team.  Despite their best efforts changes to systems are made that make a bad process worse, eliminates existing functionality, and implements changes to work that creates black holes (scenarios where work that exists can no longer be transacted in the system).

No conversation on systems are complete if we don’t discuss middleware.  Magical pieces of software often custom that connect main ERP to other systems.  Since the cost of building a direct interface is prohibitive or there is no budget left to pay for more consultants to build the bridge a sacrifice is made to write custom code that will take the output of one system and convert it to a format that can be ingested into the other system.  Often a third party is hired to write this middleware who are booted out of the project eventually as budgets get strained and they leave behind no documentation.   There is no internal expertise on Middleware and a third-party maintenance provider is hired to support the business after go live who have limited understanding of how the middleware works. So, when all hell breaks loose after go live the business will need to fend for themselves.  It leads to tremendous amount of frustration in an already overloaded workforce.

So, what do companies do to become more efficient and make work more frictionless.  They need to appoint process improvement champions reporting to senior leadership whose sole purpose is to start with a clean slate and define how work needs to be done.  These people need to be able to separate needs vs wants and develop clear understanding of requirements working with the various functional heads.  They become the key resource to hire/manage system architects to design a system that will embed the new processes.  These people become the champions and the change agents to change old habits and help the staff unlearn inefficient work practices.  They also become the champions to tackle the myriad complaints against the current system. 

Systems for the most part are not at fault for they are configured by humans to do work in a specific way.   The inefficiency in the system is the fault of those who architected the system to work that way.  These process champions become change agents who need to communicate effectively how the new process will make the company more efficient and actually simplify how work is done and what work needs to be done.  Their basic premise should be make work more relevant and more seamless.  In the process, they should also champion elimination of work roles that are doing work on behalf of someone else and point the work back to those who are accountable for it.  Doing so will make the work process frictionless.