A process wrong for three years
By Natalia Fernández Matienzo ·
Somewhere, right now, a process has been wrong for three years.
No one's looked.
It can fail two ways: run badly, or run perfectly and still be the wrong process. Everyone watches the first.
The second doesn't look like failure —it looks like everything's working.
Every operation that used to need a person —invoicing, procurement, reconciliation, onboarding— now has a tool that promises to run it without one.
Faster, cheaper, always on. And it's true.
That's the part worth being careful about.
Is it running correctly?
A machine beats you at that. It doesn't get bored on the hundredth invoice, or talk itself into skipping the check because it's late and the last fifty were fine.
Is this still the right process, though?
Does it match what the business needs now —or is it doing, faithfully, what made sense when it was set up?
That's one a machine can't answer for you. It can show you the rules haven't moved; it can't feel that the world has.
Once automated, a broken process only breaks faster.
A stale one gets you stale at scale.
Speed passes for progress: something is finally happening, cleanly, at volume.
But a process aimed the wrong way is just a mistake that never goes down.
So no one dares to touch it. By then it isn't even a decision —it's just how things work.
Has anyone even checked, lately, that it's still worth running?
Hand the wrong one off, and it goes unquestioned —just another three years of it looking exactly right.