When converting from a traditional process to an electronic one, half my job is twisting people's arms and playing mind reader trying to determine what they ACTUALLY do day-to-day instead of the hypothetical offical, documented, process.
Some of the workarounds that people do instead of updating the process are damn right unhinged.
edit: Otoh, my boss is kinda giving up on automating another group's process, because he seems to be getting a lot of 'it depends' answers.
So what ultimately winds up happening is, you'll roll out the process according to the official way, and then it is drip-drip-drip of changes as you find out the real-world version.
If the system is broken, this is actually a good thing.
I have some experience doing automation work in small and large scale factories. When automating manufacturing work you almost always discover some flaws in the product or process that humans have been covering up as part of their job. These problems surface during the automation phase and get prioritized for fixes.
You might think you could accomplish the same thing by directly asking the people doing the work what could be improved, but in my experience they either don’t notice it any more because it’s part of their job or, in extreme cases, they like that the inefficiency exists because they think it provides extra job security.
And the system is always broken. Reality is messy, systems are rigid, there always has to be a permissive layer somewhere in the interface.
Sometimes when you reveal extensive noncompliance with dumb requirements, the requirements get less dumb. Other times, the organisation doubles down and starts punishing the noncompliance.
My employer's official security policies say everyone should kensington lock their laptop to their desk at all times, even though the office is behind two guards and three security doors. Nobody does. But if someone made a load of noise about it, there's no guarantee they'd remove the widely ignored rule; they might instead start enforcing it.
We need waste as much as we need investment. The trick is to find the value in between. I think the sweet spot will be augmenting work, not necessarily optimizing it.
The two things that matter, housing and food, are way way up.
[0]: "Computer Says No" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0YGZPycMEU