I'm Karina McGill, founder and principal consultant of Atom + Bits. Most modernization efforts don't fail because the technology is bad — they fail because someone tried to automate a workflow nobody understood in the first place. At Atom + Bits, we find where the work really happens versus where the org chart says it does: the shadow spreadsheets, the workarounds, the one person everyone's afraid to let take vacation. We surface that before you spend your AI budget automating confusion at scale.
Let us show you how this worked, from a $100M ERP modernization across 32 plants to a learning platform reaching 300,000 associates. The key takeaway: start with the people doing the work, and the technology follows.
How making the invisible visible unblocked this project and sped up value delivery.
A human-centered readiness assessment. Discover your risks before they cost you.
Every case here started the same way — figuring out how work actually happened before anyone touched the technology.
We've mapped thousands of workflows by looking over the shoulders of the people who know the work, not by reading process docs or SOPs. The real system lives in how people do the work, make decisions, create workarounds, and hand things off to others. Skipping this step makes all the other steps harder and more expensive.
People aren't great at storing and retrieving complex information without something to look at for reference. So why make things harder than they need to be? Service blueprints, process flows, decision-trees, roadmaps, mindmaps. When trade-offs are laid out where everyone can see them, the arguing stops and the deciding starts.
No initiative worth its investment should be designed to "launch and leave." Build in change champions, governance and support models, and continuous improvement processes that outlast the project team. Go-live is the start of adoption, not the end of the project.