CAQA Digital / The Paper That Never Left

Putting a process online is not the same as improving it

The two are routinely described in the same language, which conceals a very large difference in ambition.

The vocabulary around digital work is unhelpfully loose. A provider can say it has moved something online and mean anything from a scanned document uploaded to a shared folder, through to a genuinely reconsidered way of handling a task where half the old steps no longer exist. Because both sit under the same phrase, boards and executives hear the same reassurance from wildly different amounts of work. The looser the language, the easier it is for a project to be judged a success against a standard nobody set.

It helps to be blunt about which one is being attempted, in writing, before anything starts. If the intention is to reproduce the current process in an electronic form because the current process is basically fine and the paper handling is the problem, say that. If the intention is to change who does what and in what order, say that too, and accept that it is a much bigger undertaking involving people whose roles will shift. Trouble arrives when a project is funded as the first and expected to deliver the second.

There is also a sequencing point worth stating plainly. Reproducing a poor process electronically tends to entrench it. Once it has been built, configured and taught, the appetite for reopening the design question drops sharply, and the awkward steps become permanent under a coat of new paint. If a process is known to be bad, the time to fix it is before it is set into anything, not after everyone has finally got used to the new arrangement.