In the end, no one but Mary knew for sure that the system was badly designed, and she may not have known either. It's one of the odd characteristics of data processing that so many systems are one-of-a-kind and there's nothing to compare them to. The business manager might suspect. It certainly didn't turn out as well as he thought it would, but it's probably in his best interest not to mention it since he okayed the design. Blanche and Mabel and the operations staff might be a little surprised that they're still doing some of the manual processing they thought was going away, but they think that's just because they don't understand data processing very well. The users will be happy with the new system, it will be much better than the old one, and who's to say that those listings and data entry steps weren't really the best way to handle the problem.