The Honest Sound of Paper

The sound of the laser printer whirring is the most honest sound in the accounting department. It’s not the hum of the servers running the new, shiny ERP system, nor the polite clatter of keyboards logging data into its meticulously structured, $2,008,000 modules. No, it’s the whir of the print cycle, followed by the quiet sigh of Maria. She’s printing the output from the “streamlined” dashboard-the one that took 8 months and $878,000 to implement-and she is re-entering every single line item into a battered, 20-year-old Excel spreadsheet named Shadow_Ops_V4.8.

She’s been doing this for six months and eight days, minimum. Every single day.

Technically, the software isn’t the problem. It’s flawless at what it was designed to do. But here’s the key, the dirty secret nobody in the C-suite wants to acknowledge: the new software was never designed to help Maria.

Designed to Watch, Not to Work

It was designed to watch her. When we buy a tool, we assume the metric for success is output efficiency. Instead, she’s 238% slower, forced into a compliance-focused workflow that prioritizes auditable traceability above all else. Every field, every required data point, every click is there to ensure that when the external auditors arrive, the process compliance box is ticked, validated, and logged timestamped.

We bought a visibility platform and called it an efficiency tool. We mistook the ability to document process for the efficiency of the process itself.

Meaningful Friction vs. Arbitrary Obstacles

I know a guy, Michael G. He’s a professional difficulty balancer for a huge video game studio. His job is literally to introduce friction. But here’s what separates Michael G. from the average enterprise UX architect: Michael G.’s friction is meaningful. It’s challenging, but it’s fair. Crucially, the player understands *why* the difficulty exists-to create a sense of earned accomplishment.

“Michael G. would design a difficult puzzle. ERP design insists you document your intent to solve the puzzle, get three departmental sign-offs on the chosen color palette for the puzzle pieces, and then input the solution using a dropdown menu with 88 sub-categories.”

Enterprise software introduces friction that is arbitrary and punitive. It slows Maria down not because the task requires precision, but because the system demands process worship.

The Ticking Time Bomb

The consequence of user-hostile design is the explosive proliferation of Shadow IT. Maria has effectively built a system-a database, and a reporting mechanism-because the expensive system failed her core mandate.

This shadow complexity, invisible to the executives, is the engine room of the business, but it’s also a ticking time bomb built entirely on one person’s tribal knowledge. Every time a system prioritizes the auditor over the operator, that gap is filled by human ingenuity, coupled with catastrophic fragility.

“Nobody is measured on ‘Maria’s level of daily existential dread when she opens the input screen.’ They are measured on system adoption rates and compliance adherence.”

The Memory of Hubris

I was guilty of this. Years ago, I pushed hard for a major CRM overhaul, convinced we needed ‘absolute centralization.’ […] I chose compliance over efficiency. The difficulty balancer, Michael G., ensures the user feels successful *within* the challenge. Our corporate systems ensure the user feels subservient *to* the challenge.

The Real Question

When you look at your next software implementation, stop asking, “How much better will this make us?” and start asking, “Whose reality is this software designed to enforce?” If the software demands more compliance effort than it saves in actual labor, then you haven’t purchased a tool; you’ve purchased an organizational philosophy of distrust, encoded in Java.

And Maria, God bless her, will continue to print out the dashboard from the $2,008,000 system and transfer those beautiful, auditable numbers into her reliable Shadow_Ops_V4.8 just to get the actual work done.