This article expands on my recent conversation with Tina Nelson, Senior Product Strategy Director at Optimizely. If you'd rather watch than read, you can view our full discussion here: ▶ Watch the conversation
When organizations begin talking about digital modernization, the conversation usually starts with technology. Teams evaluate platforms, discuss integrations, explore AI capabilities, and build business cases around faster execution and improved customer experiences.
Those are important conversations to have, but things get really interesting when we start mapping how work actually moves through an organization. At that point, something typically comes to light that no one was previously looking at: a surprising amount of the work happening every day isn't creating value at all. It's simply helping work move from one person, team, or system to the next.
Most organizations don't think about this as work because it's become part of the routine. It blends into the day.
It’s routing approvals. Sitting in status meetings. Searching for information. Following up with someone for an update. Hunting for the latest version of a document. Copying information from one system into another.
None of those activities seem particularly significant on their own. But together, they consume an extraordinary amount of time. Over the years, I've come to think of this as invisible work.
Most organizations can tell you how long it takes to launch a campaign or publish content. They measure cycle times, deadlines, and project milestones. What they often can't tell you is why those activities take as long as they do.
The answer usually isn't found in one major bottleneck. It's found in dozens of small moments of coordination that accumulate throughout the process. Or, as I call it, death by 1,000 paper cuts. Every handoff, every approval, every request for clarification, every search for missing information adds a little more friction. Individually, they're easy to dismiss. Collectively they can define how quickly an organization is able to execute.
Before making decisions about specific technology, I encourage leadership teams to ask themselves: How much of our team's day is spent creating value versus simply coordinating work?
When organizations are excited about modernization, it's tempting to jump straight into platform evaluations and implementation planning. But technology doesn't eliminate work that you haven't identified yet. If the coordination problems remain hidden, they'll often follow you into the new platform.
As AI helps teams create content faster and complete routine tasks more efficiently, the constraint often shifts somewhere else. If content can be generated in minutes but still runs through disconnected workflows, requires multiple approvals and manual coordination before it reaches customers, the bottleneck hasn't disappeared. The organization has simply become capable of producing work faster than it can move it.
That's why I believe one of the most valuable exercises leadership teams can undertake before modernizing is to make the invisible visible.
Map the journey. Ask why each step exists. Challenge assumptions that have become part of everyday work. Some activities are essential and protect quality or reduce risk. Others continue simply because they've always been there.
Modernization isn't only about introducing new capabilities. Sometimes the greatest opportunity comes from removing work that should never have existed in the first place.
Only then can technology deliver on the promise that made the investment worthwhile in the first place.