An Excel macro exposes the ultimate dead end of enterprise digital transformation

Recently, an IT leader complained to me.

He said there was a business employee in their company who spent time processing a data report every day, using Excel macros to handle the work, and this workflow had been running smoothly for several years.

He thought this process could be solidified into an Agent, turning it into a reusable capability for the company, so that they wouldn't have to rely on this person to run it manually every time.

Then the conversation went like this —

The IT leader said:

"Let me turn your workflow into an Agent. From now on, you won't need to run it manually every time, and other people can also use it."

The business employee replied:

"There's no need. The processing isn't complicated, I can finish it in less than half an hour. Doing what you suggested would require redoing everything from scratch."

The IT leader was stunned.

He later told me: "I didn't know how to respond to him at that moment. He was right, it can indeed be done in half an hour. What reason do I have to make him change?"

This is not a technical problem. It's a philosophical moment.

"Whoever suffers, changes"

From the perspective of application scenarios, the business employee's logic is impeccable.

I don't have any pain points right now, why do you want me to change?

Years of experience in enterprise digital transformation construction tell us: "Whoever suffers, changes."

For something an employee can finish in half an hour, the efficiency is already high enough for him. This judgment, from his personal point of view, is completely correct and makes perfect sense!

But the problem lies exactly here —

An employee's "no pain points" is often the organization's "invisible pain point". This pain point is not borne by him, but by other people in the organization.

Who is bearing it?

First, that IT leader. Once that business employee leaves the company, no one will be able to handle the task that "takes half an hour to finish". The IT department will need to re-sort out the logic and rebuild the process, and the cost will be far more than half an hour.

Second, the person who will take over this report in the future. He doesn't know the logic of the macros, or where the data source is, so he can only figure everything out from scratch.

Third, the managers who rely on this report to make decisions. They don't know if the data processing logic is consistent, or if any manual adjustments have been made, so they can only assume that "it should be correct".

Individual efficiency comes at the cost of organizational vulnerability.

But the business employee is not responsible for this.

Only the IT department is anxious about it.

Reading this, you might think the IT department is worrying far more than their salary justifies! If you agree, leave a comment in the section below.

"No pain points" is a privilege

And it's a very expensive privilege.

I have worked with many companies, and found a rule: The more frontline the business staff are, the easier it is for them to "have no pain points"; the more back-end support departments are, the easier it is for them to be "full of pain points".

The reason is simple: the pain points of the support departments are immediate — if they can't get things done today, they will feel uncomfortable right away, so they have the motivation to change. But the organization's pain points are delayed — the pit buried today may not blow up until half a year later, and when it does, the person who takes the blame is often not the one who dug the pit.

So when that business employee said "there's no need", what he actually meant was:

"Things are fine for me the way they are. The problem you mentioned isn't my problem anyway, why do you want me to change?"

This isn't selfishness.

It's human nature.

In any organization, whoever bears the cost has the motivation to change. If the cost is borne by someone else, why should I change?

This is why many companies cannot push forward their digital transformation —

The people promoting digitalization are often not the ones who feel the most direct pain points. The IT department suffers, but the business department doesn't; the boss suffers, but the middle management doesn't; the future will suffer, but the present doesn't.

Without the transmission of pain points, no change will happen.

— Reading this, is this the situation in your company? Let's talk in the comment section! Don't swipe away just yet —

The ultimate dilemma of IT

Let's go back to the situation of the IT leader at the beginning.

What he is facing is the most typical dilemma of IT in enterprises: You are anxious about other people's pain points, but they know nothing about it and have no intention of making any changes for it.

What's even more frustrating is that this kind of anxiety is often one-way.

What IT sees is: this process is non-inheritable, non-auditable, non-reusable, and the organization is systematically accumulating vulnerability.

What the business employee sees is: I finished it in half an hour, why are you making trouble for me?

Then IT becomes that "troublemaker" — even though they want to help the business improve efficiency, in the eyes of the business team, IT is "meddling", "making trouble", and "doing irrelevant things".

There's a case I always remember —

In a company, every sales manager recorded sales data with their own set of Excel templates, with different fields, different statistical standards, and different update frequencies. The IT department spent three months building a unified sales data platform, hoping everyone could input data into it so that it could be automatically aggregated later. But after half a year of promotion, the usage rate was less than 20%. The sales managers all had the same reason: "My own spreadsheet works perfectly fine, and it takes an extra ten minutes to enter data into your system, so I don't have that pain point." In the end, the project failed. Three years later, the company wanted to do sales data analysis, only to find that the historical data didn't match, couldn't be found, and most of the data was lost. At that point, no one remembered that the sales managers refused to use the system. Everyone only remembered: "The system IT built is not easy to use."

What IT is doing is often "preventing future pain". But future pain is never as convincing as present convenience.

Is there a solution?

So what can be done? Should we just let the business employees stay "free of pain points"?

I think the solution doesn't lie in persuasion, but in making pain points visible, perceptible, and clearly attributable.

Specifically —

First, assign the pain point to the right person.

Don't bear other people's pain points for them. When that business employee leaves, who will take over his work? Let his superior bear the cost — for example, extending the handover period, and counting the mistakes made by the new successor into the original employee's performance review. When the pain point belongs to the right person, change will happen.

Second, turn "invisible pain points" into "visible events".

Don't talk to business employees about "future risks", people can't feel risks that haven't happened. Turn the pain point into a specific event — for example, when this person is on vacation and no one can make the report, when the boss asks about it, let his superior directly experience that pain point.

Third, lower the threshold of change, instead of raising it.

When that business employee said "it will require redoing everything", that's a real resistance. If the cost of building the Agent is "redoing everything from scratch", it's indeed unnecessary. But if IT can say "you don't need to redo it, I'll help you with it, you just need to confirm the logic", the resistance will be much smaller.

But none of these three things can be promoted by the IT department alone.

It requires the management to understand a truth: organizational efficiency is not equal to the sum of individual efficiency. An employee's "no pain points" is often the organization's "pain point transfer" — shifting the pain to the future, to other people, and to the whole organization.

Many bosses don't understand this truth either.

Conclusion

That IT leader later told me that he finally replied to that business employee:

"Okay, you can keep doing it this way for now. If one day you leave and the successor can't handle the work, remember to write down the logic of the macros."

The other person replied "Okay".

But both of them knew clearly: he would never write it down.

The cost of individual efficiency is the loss of organizational memory. This kind of thing happens in every company every day, but no one counts it as a cost.

Whether you count it or not, it's always there.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Xiangjiang Digital Review" (ID: benpaoshuzi), written by Lao Yang, and authorized for release by 36Kr.