When Technology Solves the Wrong Problem
By Emily Myers, Clarity Solutions Group
New system. New vendor. New implementation timeline. And somewhere on the other side of go-live, the same staff are still manually tracking what went out, following up on what didn’t come back, and building workarounds for the gaps the new system didn’t close.
The Workaround Problem
Most agencies have them… A spreadsheet that tracks renewal notices because the system doesn’t. A staff member who personally follows up on returned mail because there’s no automated flag. A folder on someone’s desktop that serves as the unofficial document queue. A process that isn’t documented anywhere but that everyone on the team knows.
Workarounds like these aren’t signs of failure. They’re signs of adaptation — people doing what they need to do to serve clients when the official process falls short. But over time, they become invisible costs. They consume staff capacity. They introduce inconsistency. And because they live outside the documented workflow, they’re rarely examined when the next modernization conversation starts.
The Right Question Before You Buy
Technology decisions in government often start with a capability question: Does this system do what we need it to do?
That’s necessary. It’s not sufficient. The more revealing question is: Does this reduce the actual burden on the people doing the work — or does it just move it?
A new eligibility system that improves case processing but generates more outbound mail volume than the mail operation can handle hasn’t solved the problem. It’s extended it downstream. A document management system that makes retrieval faster but still requires staff to manually sort and index incoming faxes hasn’t addressed the real bottleneck.
The friction doesn’t disappear when you go live. It relocates.
The agencies that navigate modernization well tend to ask a different set of questions early in the process: Where does work actually stall today? What are staff doing manually that shouldn’t require human intervention? What happens to a notice after it leaves our system — and do we know if it arrived?
Those questions surface the operational reality. And operational reality is where good technology decisions get made.
What Burden Reduction Actually Looks Like
There’s a meaningful difference between a tool that automates a step and a tool that eliminates the need for the step.
Automating outbound mail is useful. But knowing whether the mail was delivered — and having the system trigger alternate outreach when it wasn’t — is burden reduction. Accepting documents digitally is useful. But automatically classifying and routing them to the right case file without staff intervention is burden reduction. Sending renewal reminders is useful. But building in follow-up logic that escalates based on non-response, across whatever channel the client is most likely to act on, is burden reduction.
The Second Half of the Year Is a Good Time to Ask
June is a natural inflection point. The first half of the year has revealed where things are flowing and where they aren’t. Staff have adapted. Workarounds have accumulated.
And for many agencies, a second half with increased redetermination volume, tighter compliance timelines, and no additional staffing is already on the horizon.
This is the moment to ask honestly: are the tools we have actually reducing burden — or have we just gotten better at working around them?
If the answer is the latter, that’s not a failure. It’s a starting point.
That’s the work we do. If you’re trying to understand where your agency’s real friction points are — and what it would take to address them — we’d welcome that conversation.
