A lot of the failures I experience at born from trying to solve business process problems with digitization, or digitization without ever asking if it’s the right thing/way to do stuff. Another common problem is focusing too much on a particular set of business processes and forgetting that every IT system is part of a package of numerous IT systems that work together.

I live in one of the most digitized countries in the world. So we’ve naturally digitized payment for public transportation. When we did it, nobody questioned the taxation system, even though it was made in the 70ies and build around a public structure called “amter” that hadn’t actually existed for many years when then system was build. We had also gone from 271 municipalities to 98 and their borders were part of the taxation too. So the taxation rules frankly didn’t make any sense and they were needlessly complicated, yet they were digitized, as is. Naturally it was a disaster, it was even predicted by the technical team and the project leads, but nobody wanted to touch the taxation politically. It got fixed eventually, but it could have been several hundreds of million danish kroner cheaper if they had simply redone the taxation models for ticket prices before the digitization.

So that’s one mistake, and a common one, both in the public and private sectors. The other common disaster is building systems for specific processes without looking at the bigger picture. Like a case working system that handles the welfare process for people who are sick. Except you forget that those citizens sometimes don’t go through official communication channels, and maybe send a letter or an email to the wrong department, so you need to be able to add those documents to their digital case file. But that’s not possible and neither is sending a notice to other systems in other departments which also deal with the same citizen. I’m guessing this last issue is bigger in the public sector than in private, because we often buy our software from companies that have very little actual domain knowledge outside of what their direct customers tell them, and the case workers they use for knowledge very often lack insights in the greater architecture of running 350+ IT systems together because they work with maybe 5 of them.

I mean, these things aren’t deadly as the x-ray machine, but they’ve been happening for the better part of 25 years and nobody seem to have really learnt anything.