Last year I was made redundant from an NHS role. Around the same time, the team I worked in got a "new system." Everything that used to live on paper — or, honestly, in something that behaved like a shared Excel sheet — was going digital.
I was still employed during the first few weeks of rollout, so I watched it happen. And the thing I remember most clearly is that it didn't make anything better. The forms moved from paper to screen, and that was more or less the whole story. The same duplications, the same overlaps, the same unanswered questions. If anything, it felt more primitive than the retro spreadsheet it replaced.
I've been chewing on why ever since, and I think it's worth writing down, because the failure mode is one every engineer will recognize once it's named.
Paving the wrong path
There's an old phrase in software: if you digitize a bad process, you get a digital bad process.
