Your New Software Hates You. Here’s Why.
The mouse clicks again. A hollow, plastic sound. That’s the fourteenth time. Sarah’s finger is getting tired, but it’s the dull ache behind her eyes that’s the real problem. The screen refreshes with the speed of a dial-up modem from 1994, revealing the same form, now with a new, cryptic error message in red: ‘Code 34: Re-authentication required.’ She’s trying to submit an expense for a box of pens. The total is forty-four dollars. A task that once involved leaving a paper receipt on her manager’s desk now requires 14 distinct steps, a two-factor authentication dance with her phone, and an upload of a PDF that the system insists is ‘improperly formatted,’ despite being generated by the company’s own scanner just 4 minutes ago.
She considers just eating the cost. Forty-four dollars for peace. It feels like a bargain.
This isn’t a glitch in the system. It’s the system working perfectly. We’ve been fed a lie about enterprise software. The lie is that it’s purchased to make employees’ lives easier, to streamline workflows, to boost productivity. This is rarely the primary objective. The real reason that multi-million dollar software suite was purchased wasn’t for Sarah, the accountant. It was for someone in a department she’s never heard of, someone whose job title is probably something like ‘Director of Integrated Compliance Oversight.’ It was purchased for the visibility it gives managers, the control it gives executives, and the audit
