I’ve seen it more than once. A beautiful, automated business process that as only entry point has a printed form that gets typed over. Too bad, there goes your consistency. The point of failure is obvious and the faults come piling up.
Once data enters a, perfectly set up and thought about, process, and it’s already faulty, there’s no going back. Of course it’s possible to create validations, check the data-entry person’s work and recheck it. It keeps being your entry-point and therefore the largest point of failure. When designing a complex, automated business process, why do we keep forgetting, or simply regretting, the point of entry?
One of the main reasons I’ve heard why this happens, is because developing a good working and flexible input-form still is considered pretty difficult. Why? You need a developer to do so. The problems that occur here are obvious. There’s little to no maintenance on the developed forms, the margin of errors is large and security is a serious issue. And then we don’t even talk about the trouble you have getting the data from point a to b.
