Elon Musk, ERP Nightmares, and the Hidden Costs of Process Debt

If you’ve worked in a big org, you’ve met RACI—Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed. People nod like they get it, then we go right back to stuffing every task into email, Slack, and a thousand Jira fields. Meanwhile, the report that started this whole mess keeps getting copied forward like a family recipe no one actually likes.

Here’s the problem: we want software to be the process. We buy the Big Thing (SAP, Oracle, insert acronym-of-the-month) and promise to “keep it vanilla” to avoid upgrade pain. Then reality hits. Vanilla doesn’t capture the nuance that makes our business… our business. So we add. A field here. A workflow there. Another integration. Ten more columns “just in case.” And just like that, your “system” turns into a junk drawer that bites back every time you reach into it.

On the other end of the spectrum are the flexible tools—Excel, email, slides—that can be anything on Tuesday and nothing reusable by Friday. Reporting and analysis get mashed together: a one-off executive fire drill gets branded as a “report,” then someone asks to reproduce it weekly. It can’t be reproduced, so the team fakes the repeatability with manual steps. Now you have a ritual with no truth inside it.

The turn: RACI isn’t a people problem first. It’s a system-of-record problem.

You can’t be Responsible or Accountable for outcomes if the “R” and “A” live in tools designed for communication, not control. Consulted and Informed also break when access is locked down so tightly that the very people who need context get it secondhand in screenshots and Slack threads. We think we’re doing governance; we’re actually doing gatekeeping.

So what works? A simple, ruthless split:

1. Name a single system of record per domain.Tickets live in JSM or Zendesk. Financial truth lives in the ledger. Product decisions live in your roadmap tool. If it generates the authoritative state change, it’s the system of record. Everything else is a notification surface.

2. Stamp every artifact as “Report” or “Analysis.”Reports are machine-generated, scheduled, and reproducible. Analysis is one-time, narrative, and disposable. Treating analysis like a report is how zombie spreadsheets get created. Treating reports like analysis is how you miss your quarter.

3. Wire RACI to the system of record, not the meeting.Responsible closes the ticket or moves the status. Accountable owns the definition of done and the acceptance criteria inside the tool. Consulted have read access and can comment where the work lives. Informed get the scheduled report—no bespoke PDFs, no “one last copy-paste.” When people ask for access, say yes by default and audit later.

4. Start ugly, then iterate only if it’s used.When a leader asks for a new “report,” ship the minimum viable view inside the system of record. If it gets used three times, improve it. If it doesn’t, delete it. The cost of adding is low; the cost of keeping is enormous.

5. Define “done” where the work lives.A closed loop beats a clever presentation. “Done” is when the record is updated, the status advances, and the downstream consumer can find it without DM’ing a human. If you need a meeting to prove it happened, it didn’t.

Will this feel slower at first? Yep. Because real process forces slow thinking: Why do we want this? Who uses it? How will we know it worked? That friction is your friend. It keeps you from creating the 1,001st field that no one will ever scroll down to fill.

Process debt isn’t just bad tools; it’s good tools used as pillows, toys, and silverware all at once. Pick what each tool is for. Put truth in one place. Then let RACI ride on rails instead of vibes.

Process Debt Truth: If your “accountability” lives in email and screenshots, you don’t have governance—you have folklore.