Business processes are generally byzantine monstrosities that have evolved to codify fundamentally pathological human power relationships. Enterprise software merely digitizes these for the most part, while preserving the pathologies that were originally codified in paper processes.

For example, the purpose of a typical corporate form (for approving purchases above a certain threshold for instance) is to protect the person processing it, create plausible deniability in the face of certain kinds of risk, create a certain distance between decision-makers and decision-enforcers so that nominal appeals processes become too expensive to pursue in practice and create large pools of money for rent-seekers to efficiently deploy to manage their returns.

Digitizing this kind of purchasing process will not change its underlying logic, which requires it to be complicated for reasons that have nothing to do with the nominal ones (i.e., arguing against the nominal reasons is pointless).

A more detailed discussion of these phenomena is in http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/1...

"Good" enterprise software that solves the nominal problem well is generally a massive threat to the power structures that dictated the creation of the original solution processes.