The hum of the printer is the first sign that something is deeply wrong. It’s a low, mechanical complaint in an office that spent the last year bragging about its new paperless initiative. Three months after the mandatory, company-wide launch of ‘Project Synergy,’ Maria, a senior accountant with 27 years of experience, is watching it print a 17-page summary report. The printer isn’t the problem. The problem is that she then takes that stack of paper, places it beside her keyboard, opens a password-protected Excel spreadsheet she built in 2007, and begins manually keying in the numbers. She calls it her ‘sanity check.’
Everyone on her team knows about the spreadsheet. Her director pretends not to. This is the silent, grinding reality of ‘digital transformation.’ It’s a grand, executive-level narrative about efficiency and data centralization that, on the ground, translates to a veteran accountant trusting her decade-old spreadsheet more than the new platform that cost the company $777,000.
The Addiction to the Big Solution
We are addicted to the idea of the Big Solution. The single pane of glass. The integrated ecosystem. We buy software like we’re buying a promise-a promise of control, of clarity, of problems simply dissolving. But what we often get is the automation of dysfunction. We take a broken, convoluted process,












































