Why Transparency in Business Systems Matters More Than Ever
From Phoenix to Horizon, the call for clarity—and a new role for business people in system design
In an era where digital systems govern payrolls, benefits, supply chains, and virtually every other facet of organizational life, one reality remains troublingly consistent: most business systems are built in ways that are opaque, brittle, and inaccessible to the very people who depend on them. Two of the most catastrophic examples—Canada’s Phoenix pay system and the UK’s Horizon IT scandal—offer chilling illustrations of what can go wrong when systems are developed without transparency, accountability, or business-user input.
But a quiet revolution is underway. A growing wave of no-code platforms is empowering business people—not just IT professionals—to build, understand, and evolve the systems they use. Among the leaders of this shift is Formever, an open-source, no-code solution that puts system logic in human hands.
Lessons from Disaster: Phoenix and Horizon
The Phoenix pay system was launched in 2016 to modernize the way Canada’s federal government paid its employees. Instead, it plunged into chaos. Tens of thousands of public servants were overpaid, underpaid, or not paid at all. The system was so complex and arcane that even those managing it couldn’t untangle the logic. The result: billions of dollars in remediation, and trust lost in government IT capabilities.
Similarly, the UK’s Post Office relied on a system called Horizon, developed by ICL/Fujitsu. When accounting discrepancies arose, the software was assumed to be infallible. Hundreds of sub-postmasters and mistresses were wrongfully accused of theft and fraud. Only years later was it revealed that Horizon was deeply flawed. Its design and error-reporting mechanisms were inscrutable to the people whose careers—and lives—it destroyed.
What links both scandals? Business systems treated as black boxes. Business logic buried in proprietary code. Decisions made without giving frontline operators—the actual users of the systems—any meaningful oversight or input. And no easy way for others to step in and understand the system when things started going wrong.
The Human Cost of Hidden Logic
These systems didn’t fail because of bugs alone—they failed because of a lack of transparency. When the logic of a system is buried in code only a handful of developers can decipher, it becomes a fragile monoculture. The departure of key personnel, or the loss of institutional memory, can make even routine maintenance or upgrades perilous. In industry slang, this is the “hit by a bus” problem: what happens if the one person who understands the system is suddenly gone?
In traditional software development, the answers are grim. Documentation is rarely complete. Codebases are often convoluted. And onboarding new team members to a legacy system is expensive, risky, and slow.
A New Model: Business-Led, No-Code Systems
Enter platforms like Formever. Designed as a no-code, open-source environment for building complex business applications, Formever takes a radically different stance: that business people should define and build the systems they use, not simply feed requirements to a remote dev team. In Formever, business rules and logic are written in clear, visual models. Everything is explicit, editable, and—critically—understandable by non-programmers.
Instead of outsourcing logic to code, Formever makes logic the core user-facing component. A consultant or team member can open a Formever-built system and see, line by line, how workflows, calculations, and integrations function. There’s no mystery—just accessible, shared logic.
And because Formever is open source, there are no proprietary barriers locking users into a particular vendor or requiring expensive outside expertise to modify the system. Teams can build systems organically, evolve them iteratively, and keep institutional knowledge distributed and accessible.
The Business Case for Clarity
Transparent systems aren’t just safer—they’re more agile. They lower training costs. They minimize the risk of cascading failure when staff turns over. They foster collaboration between business and technical teams. And they create a real sense of ownership and agency among the people who actually use the software.
In a world where digital infrastructure is increasingly mission-critical, it is not enough for systems to work. They must also be understandable. They must support not only today’s business requirements but tomorrow’s workforce transitions and crises.
The Phoenix and Horizon disasters teach us that opacity in system design is not just a technical problem—it is a human one. And as tools like Formever demonstrate, we now have better ways to build.
The future of business software lies not in hidden code, but in visible logic, human collaboration, and systems that make sense—no matter who’s sitting at the desk.