OP must be very young. In corporate environments there is no sidestepping.

Say there's 20 pounds of work for 10 pounds of (recently downsized) people across multiple departments. The way you'd like to see technology work is turn 20 pound of work into 10 or less pounds of work for the entire company. The way technology is actually used in the real corporate world is your boss has you automate procedures and policies such that you push work out of your department and onto even more overloaded competing departments. That's how the strongest competitors are determined for promotion and bonus.

To some extent its a startup vs old company problem. Trust me, if technology could be applied to solve the whole company wide problem, grandpa would have already done it with punchcards decades ago, the only innovation that happens in old companies is pushing work and blame onto other departments. Hey, I have a number that proves we're now better, and that's all that matters.

The other way it works is as a weapon / scapegoat. They don't wanna work with us and I don't want to force them, or can't make them. But I can tell my programmer to change the bounds checking on that input field and they'll be forced to cooperate or shut down. If it works and they cooperate with us, I'll take the credit, if it fails, I'll blame and fire the programmer. Or if you don't want them to work with us (as in dump work on us) the programmer can sabotage their system, and again you can guess the different pathways for reward and punishment.

Oh, I've worked in big companies. I was just trying to be an optimist here.

As an example where my optimism is warranted: broken builds. You can either make it a `people problem' and tell people to be super careful; or you go for the technical solution and automate the whole thing, so that only commits that build and pass tests get merged into master.

Of course, there's no office politics in my example; so this was easy.

The humble spreadsheet liberated white collar workers to do automate simple (and not so simple) calculation tasks themselves. No begging the computer folks necessary any more, who can hold your department `hostage' at will.

You can bet that from the point of view of spreadsheet adopters, they sidestepped a whole host of political problems.

I've been in many situations where people thought that the solution lay in something technical, whereas the actual issue was social/cultural. In the worst case, time and energy is spent on the technical thing, which then simply fails when it hits the 'market' (so to speak). In the best case, the technical solution papers over a few cracks and merely kicks the can down the road.

I think GP was suggesting that technical bandaids were being placed on compound fracture type injuries, rather than addressing the root issue.

If you sidestep the problems entirely, sure, but I think that's the minority of cases where a genuinely hard social/political problem exists, a technical approach attempted, and the outcomes measured. We can all readily recall Uber as an example in the positive direction. What we are worse at is seeing or recalling the hundreds of times humans struggled with a technical solution that hacked away at the visible leaves while the root remained unaddressed.

That's the problem, you can't solve people problems with technology, god knows I've seen enough people try ...

It's a great way to feel like you've accomplished something while actually making the real problem harder to discover and diagnose.