CAQA Digital / The Paper That Never Left

The form that moves between the same desks in the same order

Digitising a process without redesigning it produces an electronic version of the queue that already existed.

Walk through a newly digitised approval in most institutions and the shape is immediately recognisable. A request is raised. It goes to a supervisor. The supervisor passes it to a coordinator. The coordinator sends it to an administrator, who checks something, and then it goes back up for a final sign off. That is exactly the path the paper took. The only thing that changed is that the paper is now a screen and the physical tray is now a notification. The queue is identical. The delay is identical. In some cases the delay is worse, because a paper form on a desk was visible and a pending item in a queue is not.

This happens because digitising is a technical decision that can be made by a small group, while redesigning is an organisational decision that requires many people to agree to give something up. Every step in a chain exists because somebody wanted visibility, or somebody once made a mistake, or somebody needs the information for a reason unrelated to the approval itself. Removing a step means telling one of those people that their reason no longer justifies the cost. That conversation is difficult, so it does not happen, and the chain is reproduced faithfully in a new medium.

The tell is easy to spot. If the number of people who touch a request did not change, and the order they touch it in did not change, then nothing was redesigned. Something was reproduced. That is not always wrong, and there are cases where reproducing a working process quickly is the sensible call. But it should be a deliberate choice with its benefits stated honestly, not a project described as modernisation that leaves the underlying arrangement exactly as it was.