Process debt: the hidden challenge in digital transformation

A different kind of check-in

A few weeks ago, I stayed at a large hotel that’s part of a well-known international chain.

Before I arrived, I’d been encouraged to check in using the hotel’s app. That’s fairly common these days, so I didn’t think much of it. I assumed it would save me a minute or two before I collected a key card from reception.

Instead, as soon as my room was ready, the app assigned it to me and activated a digital key on my phone. While a colleague queued at reception to collect a key card, I went straight to my room, held my phone against the lock and let myself in.

Checking out the following morning was equally straightforward. A couple of taps in the app, my invoice arrived by email and I was on my way.

It wasn’t until later that I realised why the experience had stood out. The hotel hadn’t invented any new technology. Smartphones have supported NFC for years, and electronic locks are hardly revolutionary. What had changed was the process.

Someone had looked at the traditional hotel check-in experience and asked a simple question: why does every guest need to visit reception?

Process debt

In technology, we spend a lot of time talking about technical debt. I wonder whether organisations also accumulate something I’d call process debt.

Processes are usually introduced for good reasons, but they’re rarely revisited. Over time, they become accepted as “the way we do things”. Instead of questioning them, we build systems around them, automate them and eventually forget why they existed in the first place.

Once you start looking for it, you see it everywhere: a chatbot that eventually tells you to call the contact centre, an online form that still results in someone re-keying the information into another system, or a polished mobile app that’s really just a more modern front end for an old process. Technology has improved the experience around the edges, but the underlying process remains unchanged. The technology looks modern, but the thinking behind it hasn’t changed.

Start with the outcome

Good digital transformation starts by asking what you’re trying to achieve, not how technology can improve the current process.

Too often, organisations start with the process they’ve always had and look for ways to make it faster, cheaper or more efficient. They don’t go far enough because they never stop to ask whether the process is still the best way of achieving the outcome.

That’s what the hotel had done. It hadn’t asked, “How can we make check-in more efficient?” It had asked, “What does a good arrival experience look like?” Once you ask that question, the reception desk becomes optional rather than inevitable.

Looking beyond technology

That’s why I think we should spend as much time thinking about process debt as we do technical debt. Sometimes the right answer is to automate a process, sometimes it’s to simplify it and sometimes it’s to remove it altogether.

Good digital transformation doesn’t start with the process. It starts by asking what success looks like. Once you’ve answered that question, you can decide whether the process should be improved, simplified or removed altogether.