Is Your Process Improvement Just Deeper Obfuscation?
Published on: Sat May 10 2025 by Ivar Strand
Is Your “Process Improvement” Just Deeper Obfuscation?
The mandate for “digital transformation” is nearly universal. Organizations are under constant pressure to digitize workflows to gain efficiency, enhance transparency, and improve controls. The objective is sound. The execution, however, is often flawed.
When an organization digitizes a process without first undertaking a critical analysis of that process, it does not achieve transformation. It achieves a deeper and more rigid form of obfuscation, hiding long-standing operational flaws inside a new layer of technology.
The Fallacy of Digitizing a Flawed Process
The most common approach to digitization is to take an existing manual process and replicate it in a software application. A multi-stage paper approval form becomes a multi-stage electronic form. A manual ledger becomes a spreadsheet.
This one-to-one translation is operationally problematic. Manual processes are often sustained by informal workarounds and the institutional knowledge of experienced staff who navigate their ambiguities. When these unexamined, often inefficient, processes are codified into rigid software logic, the human capacity for adaptive judgment is lost, and the inherent flaws become permanent, automated features. The process is not improved; it is simply encased in code.
From Inefficiency to Codified Risk
This superficial digitization does more than just preserve bad habits. It transforms them into new and more challenging forms of institutional risk.
- Transparency is Obscured, Not Enhanced. A convoluted manual workflow is visibly inefficient. When hidden inside a digital system, that same convoluted workflow gives the appearance of a streamlined process. The underlying inefficiency remains, but it is no longer visible to management, making it harder to identify and correct.
- Technical Debt is Created. Building a digital system around a flawed process is the definition of creating technical debt. When the organization eventually recognizes that the underlying process must be fixed, it will face a far more expensive challenge: re-engineering not just a workflow, but the software that enforces it.
- Accountability Becomes Diffuse. In a manual system, process failure can often be traced to a specific step or person. When a flawed automated process generates an error, the cause is buried in system logic. Program and finance teams may lack the technical expertise to question the system, and the “black box” becomes an accepted, unchangeable part of operations.
The Mandate for Process Rationalization
True process improvement begins not with technology, but with a rigorous and honest mapping of existing workflows. The goal is to rationalize the process first—eliminating redundant steps, clarifying responsibilities, and defining clear rules—and only then to employ technology to enable the improved design.
This is where independent verification provides significant value. An external analysis can map current-state processes objectively and identify the specific points of failure or inefficiency that must be addressed before any digitization project begins. Following implementation, technical assurance is then required to confirm that the software accurately reflects the new, rationalized process and has not introduced new, hidden vulnerabilities.
Technology is a tool for enabling good processes; it is not a substitute for them. Chasing digital transformation without a commitment to foundational process improvement does not lead to transparency. It leads to a more efficient way of hiding problems.
