There’s an old warning in technology: if you digitise a mess, you get a faster mess. Yet organisations do it constantly — automating a broken process, building an app on top of a tangle — and then wonder why the results disappoint.

Paving the cow-path

It’s called “paving the cow-path”: laying technology over a route that exists only by historical accident. The process grew step by step, each addition sensible at the time, until nobody questions the whole. Digitise it as-is and you lock in the complexity — now it’s faster, harder to change, and just as illogical as before.

Simplify first

The more valuable sequence is to simplify, then digitise:

• Map it honestly — see the process as it really runs, not as the manual says.
• Question every step — why does this exist, and what breaks if we stop?
• Remove and merge — strip the steps that add no value before automating the rest.
• Then digitise — apply technology to a process worth keeping.

The pragmatic takeaway

Technology amplifies whatever it’s applied to — good or bad. Simplify the process first, and digitisation makes a good thing faster instead of cementing a bad one.