[pas]

The problem is that we are flooded with low-quality tools.

In general it is almost universally true of software nowadays. (Because change/progress leapfrogged any kind of teleological end-to-end design OR it's simply unmaintained, for example see any US government IT system. Or the ubiquitous extremely fragile corporate synthetic snowflake software that only runs on Windows XP SP1 + that 3 particular patches with that exact vc6.dll copied over from an old CD.)

A good quality information processing tool is designed for the process that it's meant to augment, ideally considering the original problem, and ultimately improving the process itself.

(Just digitizing a form likely leads to worse outcomes. Because those forms were designed for pen and paper. Screens and keyboard navigation requires different flows.

And the usual process is even worse, which consist of reinventing the wheel without context, as in speedrunning through all the problems of corporate politics and procurement, delivering some half-assed milestone-driven monstrosity, and forcing it on employees.

Of course, due to the aforementioned universal internal incompetence-fest and quarter-driven development budgets are bad, required time and effort is underestimated, learning curves are ignored, software gets set in stone too soon, and thus efficiency remains well below the expected, planned, possible, and hoped for.)

[littlestymaar]

I think the main reason why we're flooded with low quality tool is due to the fact that with software you just copy-paste your prototype to production: unlike real world system where you build a prototype to show stuff and then have to industrialize it to get to production, for software this expensive (and crucial for quality) step is skipped entirely, and we are all stuck using prototypes…

This and seeing “code written” as the asset, instead of an artifact of “engineers increasing their mastery of the topic”, which is the true asset. But it's very closely related to the first point.

[pas]

Yep, the elimination of in-house expertise was ridiculously short-sighted (which is an extremely charitable and euphemistic version of breach of fiduciary duties).

[datadrivenangel]

Ideally you computerize away the process as much as possible.

A common failure mode of digital transformation processes is taking the old people process and computerizing it without revisiting the underlying process.

[pas]

Other important thing is that paper was able to handle "all the exceptions", notes on margins, corrections, other paper clipped to it, whatever. Sure it was ugly, but it was in-band.

If there's no way to do this in a new system, then it means there will be a parallel semi-official informal shadow of it scattered around in out-of-band channels (emails, phone, paper!), and that leads to more complexity, which kills efficiency.