This whole article is brilliant by Jane Ruffino, but this bit leapt out at me for scrapbooking:
I can make the software as usable as possible, but I also need to remember that it’s not in the software where we’ll fix the problems that cause the software to exist in the first place.
It’s spot on about that familiar magical thinking: that a new bit of software is (on its own) going to change how a team works or a service is delivered or how a group of people behave, rather than also doing the (harder, less palatable) work of addressing root causes and absent/failing processes.
It’s also spot on – per the brilliant title of the article (“nobody wants to use any software”) – that users just want the “quick do”, the “boring magic”, the need met. Someone once told me about a motor insurance company’s mantra that what the customer wants from them is to “uncrash the car”. They don’t want to use the claim service, and repair service, the hire car service and the physiotherapy service – they just want it to unhappen. They don’t want to use any software, they want their needs met (or not to have occurred at all). It’s all like that.