The latest reorg created six new capability-owner positions. Each carries a fancy title and a direct line to the vendor's success manager, yet none includes budget or permissions to adjust thresholds or retrain on local data.
Within eight weeks the first internal candidate quit. She had spent three of those weeks logging incidents that used to be fixed in an afternoon by walking to the data engineer's desk.
The vendor's contract counts every escalation as a 'knowledge transfer touchpoint'. Leadership celebrates the rising ticket volume as proof the new roles are working.
What actually transfers is fatigue. The remaining analysts now route anything non-standard through the portal because the role description explicitly forbids direct changes to production configurations.
Your finance team still pays the original licensing fees plus the new success-manager retainer. No line item tracks the cost of the two senior hires who left after the reorg or the projects now stalled waiting on vendor responses.
The pattern repeats across mid-market firms that treat role redesign as a substitute for retaining actual control. Titles proliferate while the people who understood the domain get turned into message carriers.