If we ask five people to sum a column of numbers giving one a computer, another a calculator, a third pencil and paper, the fourth an abacus, and leave the last to their fingers and toes, the process each uses will depend entirely on the tool provided to them. None of the processes are inherent to the functional consideration summation. 

When judged by process instead of function, it is irrelevant to the carpenter whether the product is sawdust or lumber.  Procedural criteria is always about using the tool, not the raw material. 

Process wrongly dominates IT thinking.

Conventional methods for planning information systems include almost no functional considerations.  Without addressing the process-function dichotomy, conventional IT tacitly assumes function has been evaluated simply because a would-be system has been decided. Thus, no functional criteria are put in place for enlightening system development and then measuring system results.  Information failure is already inevitable. We feel it in the costs, confusion, frustration, and disappointment, but don't see it because we measure the efficiency of what we do, not the efficacy of what we accomplish.

Procedural thinking unenlightened by functional criteria will always get it wrong.  If Henry Ford and the Wright Brothers had mechanized process instead of function, cars would gallop and airplanes would flap.  By putting process over function, washing machines would be robots that haul laundry down to the nearest stream to beat it with a rock.

Yet this is the essence of IT.  One of the biggest advantages the IT industry enjoys is that nobody can see its products in the same way we would see galloping cars, flapping airplanes, and clothes whomping robots. If we could, we wouldn't buy them.  Their clumsy incapabilities, obscured in virtuality, would be obvious. 

The IT industry has never developed even minimally adequate functional criteria.