Tools are just part of a workflow.
Yes, and that work flow must be properly designed or the intended process never sucessfully completes or it is filled with errors. He is what happened to me yesterday at the grocery store:
I placed in my cart a few veggies, some tomatoes, some broccoli, potatoes. I navigated to the checkout line and a pretty young lady smiled at me as she grabbed each item and ran it over the scale for a measurement of its weight. I happened to notice that her name tag was "Ms Garmin" which I thought was odd. So anyway I just stood there and expected her to ask for the payment so I could be on my way. But she did not do that. She handed me a register tag that has a lisitng of all the items weights but no names of the items nor their correlated prices, just a paper tape with a listing of numeric weights. I asked her how much I owed. Her response was. "Oh I guess you did not see my name tag, You are in an isle where the work flow is a little different here. Did you pay attention and make a note with pencil and paper as I weighed each item, you did that didn't you? To see your whole completed bill take my paper tape of numbers and your hand written list and go to see Mr. iPad over there at the store entrance, he is the guy with the cash register, and he will correlate your notes with my measurements and compute the cost there at that separate station and give you a final bill, you then will be all set!"
I protested to her that "I never made those notes so I have nothing to show Mr. iPad" to which she responded "Well not to worry Mr iPad has an auto sync of my paper tape, so all you have to do is have him hand you the iPad and you can stand there and "edit" each line of weight data with the name of the vegetables and you will be all set!" She then paused for a moment and commented "Of course you need to be very careful, as we find that many customers make errors when they talk to Mr iPad, like for example they do not realize that the tape and the sync is not linear from the top down, it is reversed, the last measured items is at the top, so that can be a little confusing, and also sometimes my weigh scale misses or faults to record a measurement, and it does not flag that in any way, so we find that a lot of customers have no way to correctly correlate the weight list with their hand written notes, as that "missing tooth" causes all the items below it to be shifted out of a correctly correlated sequence by one" .. As I walked over to the iPad station I looked back at her and she was waving a finger at me and called out, loud enough for the entire store to hear, "Now You Be Careful over there at the iPad station !!!"
I thanked her, and proceeded to see Mr. IPad. He and I did the best we could with what we had. I was finally able to pay the bill. I fired up the car and went home and handed the paper tape and vegtables to my wife. She looked over the tape and her eyes became very angry. In an irritated tone of voice she said "Damm, you bought 10 lbs of tomatoes and only one pound of potatoes !" - I did not bother to try and explain. I went over to the fridge, grabbed a beer, flopped down in my easy chair and turned on the ball game.
